Invisible Women
Page 29
Residents wanted to return to the Bricks because, like Brazil’s favelas, these public housing projects provided more than shelter: they provided a social infrastructure, filling in the gaps left by a laissez-faire state. ‘Public housing might not have been the best, but everybody was somebody’s momma back up in there,’ one woman told IWPR. When the women were displaced and dispersed – and then had their homes demolished – they lost all that. But because we don’t measure women’s unpaid work, a need to maintain such informal ties once again was not factored into any rebuilding efforts. The social networks provided by the housing projects also meant that women felt safer, which in turn made them more mobile. ‘[T]he city wasn’t too bad,’ explained one woman, ‘because everybody knew everybody, and then once you got towards Orleans and Claiborne [streets], you were safe because you knew everyone.’
The mobility of women living in the Bricks was also supported by the regular buses and variety of stores in walking distance. But again, all of that has changed. Walking is no longer an option for many of the displaced women who now live miles from the nearest stores. And bus schedules have been changed: where buses used to come along every fifteen minutes, it’s now not unusual to have to wait for an hour. One woman lost her job as a result. Rather like the planners behind Brazil’s Minha Casa, Minha Vida, transporting low-income women to their places of employment does not seem to have been considered a priority by the architects of New Orleans’ regeneration.
There is no international law requiring that women’s voices be included in post-disaster planning – although based on the evidence perhaps there should be. When it comes to post-conflict contexts, however, we have UN Security Council Resolution 1325.
UNSCR 1325 ‘urges all actors to increase the participation of women and incorporate gender perspectives in all United Nations peace and security efforts’. Following ‘decades of lobbying’ from women’s rights activists,7 this landmark resolution was passed in 2000. But eighteen years on, further progress has been minimal. For a start, the available data is scant8 – which in itself is suggestive about the seriousness with which this resolution is taken. As for what data does exist, it’s hardly encouraging. Only two women have ever served as chief negotiators and only one woman has ever signed a final peace accord as chief negotiator.9 Funding for the implementation of policies related to women’s rights in post-conflict contexts remains ‘inadequate’,10 as does progress on the basic requirement of including women in all delegations.11 Even where women are included, they remain in the minority and excluded from positions of power, and in some areas, we have even regressed: in 2016 only half of that year’s signed peace agreements contained gender-specific provisions, compared to 70% of signed peace agreements in 2015. In the June 2017 Afghanistan peace talks, women made up 6% of negotiators, 0% of mediators, and 0% of signatories.
Causal data for the sudden reversal between 2016 and 2017 is not available, but a clue comes courtesy of a participant at an off-the-record round table on women, peace and security at the International Peace Institute in New York in 2014. ‘The UN and other powerbrokers succumb to requests not to have women in the room,’ the participant claimed. ‘When the local government says “We don’t want women,” the international community compromises and says “OK.”’12 As in post-disaster contexts, the reasoning given varies (cultural sensitivities; including women would delay the negotiations; women can be included after an agreement has been reached) but they all boil down to the same line that’s been used to fob women off for centuries: we’ll get to you after the revolution.
It’s a rationale that is clearly a function of sexism, a symptom of a world that believes women’s lives are less important than ‘human’ lives, where ‘human’ means male. But the ease with which international agencies toss UNSCR 1325 out of the window is not just sexist. It’s foolish. The presence of women at the negotiating table not only makes it more likely that an agreement will be reached,13 it also makes it more likely that the peace will last. Analysis of 182 peace agreements signed between 1989 and 2011 demonstrated that when women are included in peace processes there is a 20% increase in the probability of an agreement lasting at least two years, and a 35% increase in the probability of an agreement lasting at least fifteen years.14
This isn’t necessarily a matter of women being better at negotiating: it’s at least in part what they negotiate for. Clare Castillejo, the specialist in governance and rights in fragile states, points out that ‘women frequently bring important issues to the peace-building agenda that male elites tend to overlook’, such as the inclusivity and accessibility of processes and institutions and the importance of local and informal spheres.15 In other words, as ever, the presence of women fills in a data gap – and an important one: recent quantitive data analysis has found ‘compelling evidence’ that countries where women are kept out of positions of power and treated as second-class citizens are less likely to be peaceful.16 In other words: closing the gender data gap really is better for everyone.
CHAPTER 16
It’s Not the Disaster that Kills You
The irony of excluding women’s voices when it all goes wrong is that it is exactly in these extreme contexts that old prejudices are least justified, because women are already disproportionately affected by conflict, pandemic and natural disaster. The data on the impact of conflict (mortality, morbidity, forcible displacement) on women is extremely limited and sex-disaggregated data is even rarer. But the data we do have suggests that women are disproportionately affected by armed conflict.1 In modern warfare it is civilians, rather than combatants, who are most likely to be killed.2 And while men and women suffer from the same trauma, forcible displacement, injury and death, women also suffer from female-specific injustices.
Domestic violence against women increases when conflict breaks out. In fact, it is more prevalent than conflict-related sexual violence.3 To put this in context, an estimated 60,000 women were raped in the three-month Bosnian conflict and up to 250,000 in the hundred-day Rwandan genocide. UN agencies estimate that more than 60,000 women were raped during the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991-2002); more than 40,000 in Liberia (1989-2003); and at least 200,000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1998.4 Because of data gaps (apart from anything else, there is often no one for women to report to), the real figures in all these conflicts are likely to have been much higher.
In the breakdown of social order that follows war, women are also more severely affected than men. Levels of rape and domestic violence remain extremely high in so-called post-conflict settings, ‘as demobilized fighters primed to use force confront transformed gender roles at home or the frustrations of unemployment’.5 Before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the average age for marriage for a girl was between twenty and twenty-five years; in the refugee camps during and after the genocide, the average age for marriage was fifteen years.6
Women are also more likely than men to die from the indirect effects of war. More than half of the world’s maternal deaths occur in conflict-affected and fragile states, and the ten worst-performing countries on maternal mortality are all either conflict or post-conflict countries. Here, maternal mortality is on average 2.5 times higher, and this is partly because post conflict and disaster relief efforts too often forget to account for women’s specific healthcare needs.
For over twenty years, the Inter-agency Working Group on Reproductive Health in Crises has called for women in war zones or disaster areas to be provided with birth kits, contraception, obstetrics care and counselling. But, reports the New York Times, ‘over the past two decades, that help has been delivered sporadically, if at all’.7 One report found that pregnant women are left without obstetrical care, ‘and may miscarry or deliver under extremely unsanitary conditions.’
This can also be an issue in post-disaster zones: following the Philippines’ 2013 typhoon in which 4 million people were left homeless, an estimated 1,000 women were giving birth every day, with almost 150 of them expected
to experience life-threatening conditions.8 Birthing facilities and equipment had been destroyed by the typhoon, and women were dying.9 But when the United Nations Population Fund asked donor nations for funds to pay for hygiene kits, staff at temporary maternity wards and counselling for rape victims, the response was ‘lukewarm’, with only 10% of the amount needed being raised.10
Post-conflict and post-disaster zones are also particularly vulnerable to the spread of infectious diseases – and women die in greater numbers than men when pandemics hit.11 Take Sierra Leone, the country at the heart of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and which has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world: 1,360 mothers die per every 100,00 live births (for comparison, the OECD average is fourteen per 100,00012), and one in seventeen mothers have a lifetime risk of death associated to childbirth.13 The government has recently released data revealing that at least 240 pregnant women die every month in Sierra Leone.14
Throw Ebola into the mix and women suddenly had two types of death to fear: from childbirth and from Ebola. In fact it was worse than that, because pregnant women were at increased risk of contracting Ebola due to their high levels of contact with health services and workers:15 the Washington Post reported that two of the three largest outbreaks of Ebola ‘involved transmission of the virus in maternity settings’.16 The fact that Ebola decimated healthcare workers (themselves mainly women) made the feminised risk even higher: the Lancet estimated that in the three countries affected by the virus, an extra 4,022 women would die every year as a result of the shortage.17
The reluctance to factor gender into relief efforts is partly due to the still-persistent attitude that since infectious diseases affect both men and women, it’s best to focus on control and treatment ‘and to leave it to others to address social problems that may exist in society, such as gender inequalities after an outbreak has ended’.18 Academics are also at fault here: a recent analysis of 29 million papers in over 15,000 peer-reviewed titles published around the time of the Zika and Ebola epidemics found that less than 1% explored the gendered impact of the outbreaks.19 But, explains a WHO report, the belief that gender doesn’t matter is a dangerous position which can hinder preventative and containment efforts, as well as leaving important insights into how diseases spread undetected.20
Failing to account for gender during the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu virus) outbreaks meant that ‘government officials tended to deal with men because they were thought to be the owners of farms, despite the fact that women often did the majority of work with animals on backyard farms’.21 During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, ‘initial quarantine plans ensured that women received food supplies, but did not account for water or fuel’. In Sierra Leone and other developing countries, fetching fuel and water is the job of women (and of course fuel and water are necessities of life), so until the plans were adjusted, ‘women continued to leave their houses to fetch firewood, which drove a risk of spreading infection’.22
Women’s care-taking responsibilities also have more deadly consequences for women in pandemics. Women do the majority of care for the sick at home. They also make up the majority of ‘traditional birth attendants, nurses and the cleaners and laundry workers in hospitals, where there is risk of exposure’, particularly given these kinds of workers ‘do not get the same support and protection as doctors, who are predominantly men’.23 Women are also those who prepare a body for a funeral, and traditional funeral rites lead many to be infected.24 In Liberia, during the 2014 Ebola epidemic, women were estimated to make up 75% of those who died from the disease;25 in Sierra Leone, the ‘epicentre’ of the outbreak, UNICEF estimated that up to 60% of those who died were women.26
A 2016 paper27 also found that in the recent Ebola and Zika epidemics international health advice did not ‘take into account women’s limited capacity to protect themselves from infection’.28 In both cases, advice issued was based on the (inaccurate) premise that women have the economic, social or regulatory power ‘to exercise the autonomy contained in international advice’. The result was that already-existing gender inequalities were ‘further compounded’ by international health advice.
We need to address the gender data gap when it comes to post-disaster relief with some urgency, because there is little doubt that climate change is making our world more dangerous. According to the World Meteorological Organisation, it’s nearly five times more dangerous than it was forty years ago: between 2000 and 2010 there were 3,496 natural disasters from floods, storms, droughts and heat waves, compared to 743 natural disasters in the 1970s.29 And beyond analyses that suggest climate change can be a factor in the outbreak of conflict30 and pandemic,31 climate change itself is causing deaths. A 2017 report in the journal Lancet Planetary Health predicted that weather-related disasters will cause 152,000 deaths a year in Europe between 2071 and 2100.32 This compares to 3,000 deaths a year between 1981 and 2010.33 And, as we will see, women tend to dominate the figures of those who die in natural disasters as well.
We didn’t have firm data on the sex disparity in natural-disaster mortality until 2007, when the first systematic, quantitative analysis was published.34 This examination of the data from 141 countries between 1981 to 2002 revealed that women are considerably more likely to die than men in natural disasters, and that the greater the number of people killed relative to population size, the greater the sex disparity in life expectancy. Significantly, the higher the socio-economic status of women in a country, the lower the sex gap in deaths.
It’s not the disaster that kills them, explains Maureen Fordham. It’s gender – and a society that fails to account for how it restricts women’s lives. Indian men have been found to be more likely to survive earthquakes that hit at night ‘because they would sleep outside and on rooftops during warm nights, a behavior impossible for most women’.35 In Sri Lanka, swimming and tree climbing are ‘predominantly’ taught to men and boys; as a result, when the December 2004 tsunami hit (which killed up to four times as many women as men36) they were better able to survive the floodwaters.37 There is also a social prejudice against women learning to swim in Bangladesh, ‘drastically’ reducing their chances of surviving flooding,38 and this socially created vulnerability is compounded by women not being allowed to leave their home without a male relative.39 As a result, when cyclones hit, women lose precious evacuation time waiting for a male relative to come and take them to a safe place.
They also lose time waiting for a man to come and tell them there’s a cyclone coming in the first place. Cyclone warnings are broadcast in public spaces like the market, or in the mosque, explains Fordham. But women don’t go to these public spaces. ‘They’re at home. So they’re totally reliant on a male coming back to tell them they need to evacuate.’ Many women simply never get the message.
A male-biased warning system is far from the only part of Bangladesh’s cyclone infrastructure that has been built without reference to women’s needs. Cyclone shelters have been built ‘by men for men’, says Fordham, and as a result they are often far from safe spaces for women. Things are slowly changing, but there is a ‘huge legacy’ of old-style cyclone shelters, which are basically just ‘a very large concrete box’. Traditionally the shelter is just one big mixed-sex space. There are usually no separate latrines for men and women: ‘just a bucket in the corner and you might have 1,000 people in these places sheltering’.
Beyond the obvious problem of a single bucket for 1,000 people, the lack of sex segregation essentially locks women out of the shelters. ‘It’s embedded in Bangladeshi culture that women cannot mix with men and boys outside of their family males,’ explains Fordham, for fear of bringing shame on the family. Any woman mixing with those males ‘is just fair game for any kind of sexual harassment and worse. So the women won’t go to the shelters.’ The result is that women die at much higher rates (following the 1991 cyclone and flood the death rate was almost five times as high for women as for men40) simply for want of sex-segregated provision.
On
the subject of the violence women face in disaster contexts, we know that violence against women increases in the ‘chaos and social breakdown that accompany natural disaster’ – but, in part because of that self-same chaos and social breakdown, we don’t know by exactly how much. During Hurricane Katrina local rape crisis centres had to close, meaning that in the days that followed no one was counting or confirming the number of women who had been raped.41 Domestic-violence shelters also had to close, with the same result. Meanwhile, as in Bangladesh, women were experiencing sexual violence in gender-neutral storm shelters. Thousands of people who had been unable to evacuate New Orleans before Katrina hit were temporarily housed in Louisiana’s Superdome. It didn’t take long for lurid stories of violence, of rapes and beatings, to start circulating. There were reports of women being battered by their partners.42
‘You could hear people screaming and hollering for people to help them, “Please don’t do this to me, please somebody help me”’, one woman recalled in an interview with IWPR.43 ‘They said things didn’t happen at the Superdome. They happened. They happened. People were getting raped. You could hear people, women, screaming. Because there’s no lights, so it’s dark, you know.’ She added, ‘I guess they was just grabbing people, doing whatever they wanted to do.’ Precise data on what happened to whom in Hurricane Katrina has never been collated.