Are Disasters Gender- Discriminatory?

November - December 2021

Adarsh Kumar Singh

Adarsh Kumar Singh is pursuing masters in disaster studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Though disaster vulnerability is a sex-neutral term and it is not based on the biological differences between men and women, due to the social construct in which different roles are assigned to men and women, it affects the latter the most. With gender overlapping with other stratified parameters of class, ethnicity, religion, region, and cultural landscapes, the degree of vulnerability experienced by women also varies at different levels. Women in third-world countries are more disproportionately vulnerable to the loss of livelihood and assets, dislocation, and hunger. The value system of patriarchal societies has acted only as a setback for women, preventing them from self-empowerment and strengthening their position in society. During disasters, women’s responsibility for securing valuable household items such as food grains, clothes, jewelry, utensils, fuel, and other kitchen utilities as well as feeding and looking after children and elderly people of the family increases manifold.

Women and Disasters

“Across the globe, women are at greater risk than men in disasters” ( Parkinson et al. 2011, Alston, 2009). Out of 300,000 lives lost to the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, 80% of them were women and children. It has been reported by the Indian Meteorological Department that a large proportion of women (34%) and children (45%) succumbed to disasters in comparison to men (21%) during 1977-2002 (Kapur, 2010). Ever since birth, a female is subjected to a multitude of discriminations such as the fulfillment of her childhood demands for foods, toys, books, and various other intangible needs such as love and affection. This often results in the development of an inferiority complex among women that access to resources and the ability to make correct decisions has been endowed only to men and that they possess the least rights to it. Therefore, despite women having awareness of hazards in their area, they are less likely to be prepared than men. Food security becomes a significant crisis especially for women, girls, and lactating mothers and when unmet with these nutritional needs during disasters, it results in increased maternal mortality and infant mortality rates and makes women more vulnerable. Unsuitable clothing during disasters also poses a serious threat to women, for it hinders their agility and swimming skills. Despite the additional responsibilities of managing household assets and additional finances of the families post disasters, women do not have the discretion to use the available resources due to the existing permission structure in the societies. They can not move outside their homes, including the local markets without restrictions, and are often accompanied to public health care centres by male members of the family who may not be as cognizant about their conditions as they are expected to be.

In the Post-disaster phase of resettlement and rehabilitation, prolonged confinement of women into relief camps with no access to clean, hygienic toilets and latrine facilities, coerces women to remain unhygienic and maintenance of bodily hygiene for women undergoing menstruation becomes more challenging in absence of sanitary napkins. The cleaning and disposal of such items also become a major issue. This engenders poor health to women and brings home multiple diseases such as reproductive tract infections, urinary tract infections, skin infections, etc. In the absence of proper security in camps, the fear of getting raped also restricts their movements inside the camps. These aspects of disasters being gender discriminatory has only been strengthened during my pursuance of “Gender and Disaster Concerns” course for my masters programme. Sarah Bradshaw also describes disasters as a gendered event, which women and girls experience differently (Collins, 2015).

Woman During COVID 19 Pandemic

Due to the stringent lockdown measures during the covid 19 pandemic, a significant number of women lost their jobs due to restrictions on stepping outside the homes, commutation to workplace, and other livelihood earning platforms such as domestic labour, micro small and medium industries either stopped operating or operating at half of their potential. Women were the ones who were most likely to lose their jobs, given the preconceived notions about women’s ability to work in fields over flexible time hours with limited mobility. The closure of administrative and judicial systems during the lockdown period hampered the access to justice by women who faced increased suppression, physical and intimate partner violence as well as sexual exploitations. According to Sen (2009), deaths in disasters are a case of violation of justice. Women and men who either died during a disaster or suffered bodily damages become victims of denial of justice, for they could have otherwise lived a long and accomplished life. He refers to it as an ‘intolerable justice’ (Sen, 2009).

Institutional Discrimination Against Women

The hurdles women face at the institutional level are reflected in the form of lesser respect by people, subordinates, colleagues, leaders as well as trust deficit in people regarding their capabilities to tackle the overwhelming situations. The role of women in household decision-making is mainly restricted to food expenditure, procurement, groceries, cooking, washing, purchasing utensils, other household items, etc. According to the Sustainable livelihoods Framework, the more assets any household has access to, the less vulnerable they will be to disasters and more secure their livelihood will be. Women in families and institutions are rarely equipped with such assets to deal with disasters.

The framing of laws, policy, and governance, as well as social norms always favoured men because these customs were framed by men, in which female aspects got ignored due to their minimal representation in socioeconomic, political, and cultural systems. Moreover, the biological childbearing trait made women only as a means to carry forward the family lineage. The advisories issued for early warning for an upcoming hazard are mostly accessible to men owing to the easy access and ownership of communication tools such as mobile phones, radio, broadcasts newspapers, television, etc. Women’s itinerary is primarily fixed for the whole day and most of their time is spent in the kitchen, doing household chores, and taking care of children and the elderly of the family and they rarely have free time to pay attention to such warnings. Moreover, the social norms have led women to believe that it is the responsibility of male members of the families to pay attention to, discuss and make strategies to deal with it, even though women have to do a lot of rebuilding and rejuvenation work after the disaster has damaged the property and households. However, there are many laws for women’s rights and protection.

Lack of Freedom of Choice and Expression

In societies, where women have less freedom of choice in deciding what to eat, how to dress, what and how to work, they become more vulnerable to disasters. For example, restrictions to wearing only sarees reduce their maneuverability and this restricted mobility hinders them in swimming, climbing, and running to protect themselves, children, and other family members. Inability to voice their opinion about their personal as well as household needs and in deciding the priorities of the family becomes detrimental to everybody during disasters, for they spend a lot of their time with, are well aware, and have a fair assessment of the strength and weakness of the physical and social vulnerabilities of the family members as well as household items. Women lack the freedom to visit healthcare centres for their health needs and have no say in family planning, reproductive health, and bodily integrity. With already less access to resources and the remaining resources in hand, if any, being taken away from women during disasters reduces their bargaining position.

Early Marriage and Human Trafficking

Disasters crackdown on the family income and cause loss of livelihood options, coercing the families to get their daughters out of school and marry them early to shift the burden to the husband’s family. Increased vulnerability of women to support children, families and fulfill additional monetary requirements during any disaster makes them fall prey to human traffickers. Human traffickers preying on vulnerable girls and women become hyperactive during disasters. Unfortunately, this becomes an opportune movement for them to kidnap and sell girl children and force them into prostitution. The informal loans at high-interest rates taken from moneylenders also put women in a precarious situation and coerce them into prostitution and sexual exploitations. Such incidences of women’s exploitation become rampant in disaster-prone areas. Existing structural gender inequalities make women a part of the excluded and discriminated groups leading to human trafficking in any region. ‘The multiple impacts that trafficking has on women and children survivors create a lifelong impairment besides regarding the human capital, development opportunities and growth of the overall scenarios and this results in mass-scale vulnerabilities and mass violence against women’ (United Nations office on drugs and crime).

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Gender-Based Violence

Women, due to their low socio-economic positions vis-à-vis men, are more susceptible to psychological problems. Mental health conditions are associated with physical health and women tend to be physically weaker than men owing to the less nutritional and vitamins intake, reproductive health risks, and other socioeconomic limitations. The additional burden of taking care of children and elderly people in the family is assigned to the women and to fulfill such responsibilities women ignore their physical and psychosocial needs such as good nutrition, proper sleep, leisure time, sports, interaction with communities. Post disasters, when the families need additional income which requires extra hours of work for earning a livelihood, women have to spend most of their time rebuilding the damaged houses reordering their functionality and this makes it more difficult for them to step outside and earn. This puts women at more risk and worsens women’s suffrage from post-traumatic stress disorder. Disasters further aggravate the uncertainty and stress in the lives of families. As a result, women eventually become the target of increased violence by their husbands and family members in such distressing hours. Intimate partner violence is also found to rise post disasters. Unfortunately, this violence is perceived to be a private affair and thus goes unreported. Women become so accustomed to such violence that it becomes justified for them to take the beatings silently. For example, during the lockdown period, people were forced to stay for longer hours in a stressful situation under one roof leading to increased instances of fights and quarrels. Families fell ill together and this led to increased workload over women for meeting the care demands of the family members in the absence of any domestic help and thus could not pay attention to her health making them more vulnerable to a psychological disorder. Moreover, the usual support structures such as hospitals, police, government welfare cells, dedicated phone lines, government-run shelter homes, One Stop Crisis Centres, legal aid cells, protection officers were either not being functional or overburdened exacerbating the miseries of women and children. The National Commission for Women states that “ there was a 2.5-times increase in cases of domestic violence registered between February 27 and May 31. It received 1,477 domestic violence complaints. In April and May 2020, 47.2 percent of all cases received by the NCW were of domestic violence, against only 20.6 percent cases between January and March 2020” (Bavadam, n.d.). “Around 243 million women and girls between the ages of 15-49 years were at the receiving end of violence during the first year of the pandemic”(World Health Organization, 2020).

Mainstreaming Gender in Disaster Risk Management

It is not that a woman has some inability by biological traits but the perception of women being weak has penetrated so much into the minds of men as well as women themselves that they found it difficult to break these barriers. Women have the know-how of adapting and coping capacity in a disaster situation, but the translation of their ideas into practice has been limited. From risk assessment to mitigation strategies, the women’s perspective has either been not taken into consideration or has been least prioritised despite several protocols and standards requiring their participation for risk management. This is reflected through the absence of gender equity policies, use of gender-specific problems redressal in policy statements, women-friendly early warnings dissemination, and representation of women in disaster agencies. Moreover, at the grassroots level, women are not able to garner the benefits of even those welfare schemes which have specifically been targeted at them. Currently, the disaggregated data of men, women, and children are not collected by the agencies involved in disaster mitigation and relief and rehabilitation because the present relief codes do not put any liability for the same (Raggie. Johansen, 2017)

However, one of the principles of the Sendai framework envisages integrating gender, age, disability, and cultural perspectives in all policies and practices (Zaidi and Fordham, 2021). To ensure this social inclusion of women as a universal and cross-cutting principle, one of the five pillars of the National Disaster Management plan 2019 is also working to address gender-based vulnerabilities. Deployment of the first cohort of dedicated women rescue teams has been among the latest developments towards mainstreaming gender in disaster risk management.

The effective implementation of the second and third point in the Prime Minister’s ten-point agenda aims at working towards risk coverage for all, starting from poor households to small & medium enterprises to multinational cooperation to nation-states and encouraging greater involvement and leadership of women in disaster risk management, will lead to reducing the Vulnerabilities of women, empower them and create opportunities to work shoulder to shoulder in early warning, forecasting, mitigating and self preparedness against disasters. Due to the patriarchal nature of families and societies, females have had less access to books, schooling, and other educational resources. Therefore, strengthening the gender parity index will enhance the understanding among women about the advisories, situation analysis, and building preparedness for disasters. The Coping measures and efforts put by women in handling disasters should be brought to the forefront not only to motivate other women but also to help strengthen their leadership roles in disaster risk management.

Acknowledgement:

I am grateful to my professor Dr Sunita Reddy for encouraging me to do write this article under the course on ‘Gender and Disaster’.

REFERENCES-

ActionAid International. (n.d.). Women lead ActionAid’s response to Cyclone Amphan. [online] Available at: https://actionaid.org/news/2020/women-lead-actionaids-response-cyclone-amphan [Accessed 10 Feb. 2022].

Amartya Kumar Sen (2009). The idea of justice. London: Allen Lane.

Bavadam, L. (n.d.). Domestic violence during COVID lockdown. [online] Frontline. Available at: https://frontline.thehindu.com/social-issues/gender/domestic-violence-during-covid-lockdown/article38034608.ece# [Accessed 10 Feb. 2022].

Collins, A.E. (2015). Hazards, risks, and disasters in society. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier.

Kapur, A. (2010). Vulnerable India: a geographical study of disasters. Shimla: Indian Institute Of Advanced Study; Los Angeles.

Neumayer, Eric. (2007). The Gendered Nature of Natural Disasters: The Impact of Catastrophic Events on the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy, 1981-2002. Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Pandit, Ambika. (2020). Domestic violence accounts for over 47% of complaints to NCW in “lockdown”. The Times Of India. p.1.

Parkinson, Debra. (2013). The hidden disaster: Domestic violence in the aftermath of natural disaster. Australian Journal of Emergency Management. (28). p.28.

Raggie.Johansen (2017). Global report on trafficking in Persons. [online] Unodc.org. Available at: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/data-and-analysis/glotip.html.

Ray-Bennett, N.S. (2018). Disasters, Deaths, and the Sendai Goal One: Lessons from Odisha, India. World Development, 103, pp.27–39.

World Health Organization (2020). Adolescent pregnancy. [online] Who.int. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-pregnancy.

Zaidi, R.Z. and Fordham, M. (2021). The missing half of the Sendai framework: Gender and women in the implementation of global disaster risk reduction policy. Progress in Disaster Science, 10, p.100170.

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