WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN DISASTERS
Dr. Elaine Enarson, Ph.D, Independent Sociologist

Reaching Women and Children in Disasters: What are the issues and how can we best address them? Over 70 practitioners, policy-makers, and researchers from North America and around the world met recently in Miami to try to answer these questions. 

Thanks, EIIP, for this opportunity to let other learn about the event and thanks, too, to our funders whose support made it a truly global conference. The conference was convened by Betty Hearn Morrow at the Florida International University's International Hurricane Center and by me with the help of many volunteers and funders. Representing regions and countries with different patterns of development, at risk of very different hazards, and where women and children lead very different lives, participants were united that in disaster events women and children have unique capacities and needs. 

We began by asking what disaster mitigation, planning, and response might look like if we acted 'as if women and children mattered'? Speakers urged an inclusive, bottom-up approach addressing the root causes of disaster vulnerability and linking disaster relief to social and economic development.

The knowledge, skills, insight, and experience of women, children, and adolescents are essential to this new paradigm in which gender equality is at the center both of disaster mitigation and sustainable development.

Reflecting the global dialogue, many speakers linked the increasing vulnerability of women and children to gendered macroeconomic forces in the process of globalization and unsustainable development, as well as to broad cultural patterns. 

To move quickly to a general discussion, today I'll simply summarize some of the issues raised by speakers and alert you that the full conference proceedings will soon be available on-line.

Regarding Vulnerability and Impacts

• The higher exposure of women and children to malnutrition and famine, sexual violence, displacement, land mine injury and other effects of sustained complex emergency.
• The gendered divisions of labor following hurricane Mitch in Central America and masculinity norms increasing men's risky decisions and actions in disaster contexts; 
• Mobility barriers, illiteracy, poverty, limited access to land, employment, and survival assets among South Asian women, as well as cultural restrictions restricting their access to information and to public disaster resources; 
• The impacts of international debt repayment policies on women and their families;  
• Racial/ethnic, economic, and age divisions among women in affluent societies like the U.S. and demographic trends increasing women's representation among the elderly, the poor, and those who live alone; 
• Rising numbers of female-headed households in the aftermath of many disasters, and the often conflicting needs and interests of women and men within households; 
• Weakened family structures supporting children after prolonged crises in Africa and the extreme vulnerability of street children around the world to violence, abuse, illness, and death; 
• Women’s risk of unemployment and loss of income-generating work after disaster and restricted access to nontraditional jobs, credit, control over their own or others' labor and time; 
• Increased levels of violence after disasters, for example in Nicaragua following hurricane Mitch, and impacts on women's reproductive health when disaster-related economic change forces their migration or relocation.

Regarding Women's and Children's Capacities and Resources 

• Women’s knowledge of water resources in the Pacific region yet their invisibility in emergency management; 
• The self-organization of women after disasters, for example, in the Caribbean, to increase small loans to women and to promote gender equity in access to construction jobs during reconstruction; 
• Women's initiative in fostering disaster relief which furthers community development, e.g. in Nicaragua after hurricane Mitch or in the Dominican Republic after hurricane Georges, where poor rural women worked through an existing NGO to assess damages and needs, involve the schools, and make sense of the event through music and drama; 
• Women's central roles as front-line responders in schools and other institutions, as caregivers to family dependents and others, as community activists and political leaders; 
• The resilience of children in extreme events and their capacity for self-organization, for example among the displaced or homeless; Children’s significance as emergency communicators with parents.

Regarding Planning and Policy

• The striking absence across regions of specific regulations, policies, laws, and practical guidelines incorporating gender analysis and the particular needs and interests of women and children into disaster planning and response; 
• The need to recognize the household as a complex and variable social arrangement with no presumed male head and no presumed unity of need or long-term interest between adult partners or between adults and children; 
• Women’s need not only for access to key resources (e.g. seeds for replanting) but for control over key resources (e.g. waged agricultural labor); 
• The age-specific needs of young people and models for including childcare in disaster relief; The need to fully involve teachers and students in light of their roles as informal family educators and disaster communicators; 
• The exploitation of women's and children's 'free' labor (as 'non-workers') during the rebuilding period, for example in Nicaragua; Lack of planning in sex-segregated societies and others for women who are widowed, displaced, unemployed, and/or impoverished by disasters and subsequently left even more vulnerable to future events; 
• Lack of integration of women's issues (e.g., domestic violence) into emergency management studies--and strategies from British Columbia for mainstreaming (e.g., integrating life safety issues in battered women's shelters into evacuation courses); 
• Women’s under-representation in emergency management programs, organizations, and institutions (especially of women representing highly vulnerable groups) and the need for more 'female-friendly' workplace and study environments in disaster work; 
• Forging links between women, disaster planners, and media representatives to increase the visibility of women and children in disaster contexts; 
• The clear need for sharing expertise, cross training between development, relief, and gender organizations, and minimizing the 'tyranny of the urgent' by proactive planning for women and children; 
• Lack of integrated services and coordination between emergency management and groups serving highly vulnerable groups (e.g. street children, the landless, senior women); 
• The unanticipated consequence of increasing social divisions when programs or services target particular groups. 

In addition, a multidisciplinary group of researchers raised such issues as the present lack of relevant institutional data disaggregated by sex and publicly available, the lack of basic research on gender as a factor in women's and men's lives in disaster contexts, and the need for more participatory research employing a range of methods. The utility of a research protocol for comparative gender analysis in disaster research was discussed, as was the need for collecting and sharing multilingual resources on women, gender, and disaster, for example through a university-based clearinghouse.  

What next? Stay tuned! We met in small groups to formulate action recommendations for research, practice, and policy. These are now being formalized for circulation through electronic networks, at professional meetings, in conference publications, and on the Gender and Disaster Network (GDN) website http://www.anglia.ac.uk/geography/gdn. 

The full proceedings of this conference will also be posted on the GDN website along with a revised international Gender and Disaster bibliography, papers, and other resources. 

Good news! To sustain the energy of this critical mass, we hope to meet again at the regional level. Thank you Kay Goss, of FEMA's Preparedness, Training & Exercises Directorate, for taking the initiative and proposing--among many good ideas--a follow-up FEMA conference next year on Reaching Women and Children in Disasters.

And now I'm eager to hear from you. Do these issues seem remote from your own experience or are there parallels? What has your own experience been in the US and countries like it? What do you think we need more research on, and what changes do you think are needed? 

I welcome your ideas and especially welcome any people tuning in today who were at the Miami conference. 

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