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WOMEN SUFFER DISPROPORTIONATELY DURING

CRISES BUT HAVE SPECIAL SURVIVOR SKILLS  

 

01 March 2010 - Women suffer disproportionately during a crisis, whether it is war, famine or a natural disaster like earthquakes and floods.

The majority of civilian casualties in conflicts are women and children, and sexual violence is increasingly used as a method of war. The death rate of women after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was at least three times higher than that of men in some communities. Women experience a heavy burden during and after disasters because they are often responsible for providing food and water for their families.

But the main reason why they are particularly vulnerable during a crisis is because of their status before disaster strikes. They are generally poorer than men, have little political voice, are often less mobile for cultural reasons, they do not own land, and are less likely than men to have an education or access to heath care.

But women are not just victims, they are also survivors who can help countries recover more quickly from natural disasters and conflict. They often have a unique ability to build bridges between warring communities, and they can find ways to protect communities from the worst effects of future disasters. But in many cases they are excluded from discussions on these issues, and their particular needs are often left out of both recovery plans and the terms of peace agreements.

Women and Conflict

Spiralling violence against women in war zones has prompted one peacekeeper to comment that it is "now more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflicts".

Rape has always been used as a weapon of war, but the brutality inflicted on women in some humanitarian hotspots today is unprecedented, many experts say.

The brutality accompanying rape in Democratic Republic of Congo is a frequently cited example, but sexual violence has been used as a weapon in many other conflicts around the world. In Rwanda, up to 500,000 women were raped during the 1994 genocide. In Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, an estimated 60,000 women were raped during the 1990s conflict there.

The U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) says one reason why brutality against women during and after conflicts has become so much worse is because the nature of war has changed. Most conflicts today are not between countries; they are within countries, pitting communities along racial, religious and/or ethnic lines. The result is that civilian populations are victimised on a massive scale and now make up the majority of war casualties. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 90 percent of fatalities in conflicts since 1990 have been civilians - many of them women and children.

To some extent, armies observe rules of conduct that militias and rebel groups do not - although, of course, soldiers also rape. Sexual violence is an effective weapon because it forces populations to flee and breaks down communities. Fear of attack prevents women from working in fields and fetching water and firewood, and it stops children going to school. And, as Amnesty International says, rape is cheaper than bullets.

There have also been reports of U.N. peacekeepers raping civilians, and humanitarian workers demanding sexual favours in return for aid.

For girls and women, the psychological, physical and social effects can last a lifetime. Unlike other crimes, communities often stigmatise the victim of rape rather than the perpetrator. Wives may be rejected by their husbands and girls rendered unmarriageable. Some victims are babies.

But reporting rape is often seen as pointless and may make things worse. In Congo, a tiny percentage of perpetrators are called to account, according to UNDP. And there are reports that many simply bribe their way out.

In October 2000, the U.N. Security Council passed a landmark resolution which for the first time explicitly linked women to peace and security. The resolution recognised that women in conflict are often targets for specific forms of violence, and said they must be included in peacemaking. A decade later, the U.N. secretary-general appointed a special representative to tackle violence against women and children in war zones.

The U.N. Development Programme's Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery has launched a strategy to address the needs of women affected by conflicts and natural disasters (see next section).

The aims include protecting women from violence, ensuring they have access to justice, strengthening women's representation, promoting equality and urging governments to work for women. The campaign also includes ensuring women participate in politics and have access to business, credit and land.

Out of 12 peace agreements reached between 1991 and 2001 that put an end to conflicts only four - El Salvador, Liberia, Sierra Leone and East Timor - included a provision directly related to women, according to UNDP.

But empowering women is not just a question of fairness. It can also speed up recovery. "Women tend to be very positive agents for reconciliation and peace," says Kathleen Cravero, former director of the UNDP's Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery, pointing out that women from different sides of a conflict often identify with one another in a way that men don't.

Natural Disasters

Natural disasters often kill many more women than men. For example, three times as many women died in the 2005 Pakistan earthquake as men. Why? Because women in the deeply conservative areas rarely venture far from their homes. They were more likely to be indoors and died when their homes collapsed on top of them.

After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami many regions found the death toll among women was three or four times higher than men. Women and girls were less likely to know how to swim, and their garments may have hindered them from running or clambering onto roofs or up trees.

Droughts can place an extra burden on women, who are often responsible for providing water and food for their families. Women's livelihoods may also be more vulnerable in disasters. For example, in some Caribbean countries women depend entirely on a single crop. When a hurricane strikes, their income is wiped out until they can sow and harvest again. By contrast, men are more able to find paid work, travelling to towns and cities if necessary.

Women are typically responsible for their children. And if they can't put food on the table they may end up selling sex, which in turn increases their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS.

Women are also at increased risk of sexual and physical violence after natural disasters. This is partly because social mores collapse with the destruction of traditional communities and partly because of the high levels of frustration in camps for displaced people. With no means to support their family, men may take their anger out on women.

Domestic and sexual violence were both reported to have increased in the aftermath of the tsunami. Examples from Sri Lanka include women who were battered because they resisted their husbands selling their jewellery, or disputed their use of tsunami relief funds, or were blamed for the deaths of their children.

Poverty

Women are more vulnerable than men before, during and after disasters. That's because women experience the brunt of the world's poverty, with serious implications for their health and livelihoods. They have less access to food, water, shelter, education, income, land, health care and basic human rights.

In west Sudan's Darfur region, where conflict has forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes to displacement camps, women work all day to provide for their families and risk attack and rape by armed groups in their daily search for firewood. "Darfurian women are the ones who generate income and hand it over to their husbands who sit the whole day in the shade conversing and drinking tea," says a report by the African Union/United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) on the role of peacekeepers in protecting women in the conflict.

The majority of the world's poor are women, according to the U.N. Millennium Campaign and the gap between women and men trapped in poverty is widening, a phenomenon sometimes called the feminisation of poverty.

Women are often denied access to resources such as credit, land and inheritance. Their lack of education also limits their ability to better their situation - millions of girls miss out on a primary education and the majority of illiterate young people are women, according to aid agency ActionAid.

And with few positions of power, women have little chance of rectifying these inequalities.

In 2000, governments committed to a set of poverty reduction goals, including halving poverty and hunger, providing every child with primary education and cutting maternal mortality, by the year 2015.

ActionAid argues that systematic discrimination against girls and women in poor countries will prevent the United Nations meeting these goals. In its report Hit or miss? Women's rights and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the agency says empowering women and girls is not just a question of justice but is the most effective route to achieving the MDG targets.

Land and Labour

One major factor contributing to women's poverty is land. Women own just 1 percent of land in the world, according to UNDP. In many places women can only access land via men - husbands, brothers etc - which means they are dependent on these relationships for their survival. Lack of rights to land also affects women's access to food. Female-headed households are more likely to suffer chronic hunger than other groups.

A global conference on women in Beijing in 1995 called on countries to undertake legislative and administrative reforms to give women equal access to economic resources, including the right to inheritance and to own land. However, progress has been slow. Only a few countries have changed their laws to make it possible for women to inherit land.

Aid agencies say protecting women's land rights in parts of Africa ravaged by AIDS is crucial to preventing rural households from slipping further into poverty. If a woman loses property or land when her husband dies it may limit her ability to feed her family and force her children out of school and into work.

Not only do women earn far less than men, but often their labour goes completely unrewarded. For example, women and girls in Africa spend some 40 billion hours collecting water each year, according to ActionAid.

Microfinancing

With no property or other collateral, women in developing countries find it difficult to secure loans to build small businesses and improve their lot.

Providing credit, especially microcredit, has proved a successful strategy for lifting women out of poverty.

The most famous example is Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Economist Muhammad Yunus set up the bank in 1976 to lend to the neediest, enabling them to start small businesses without collateral. In doing so, he pioneered microcredit, a system now copied around the world.

Grameen has helped millions of families break out of poverty. Nearly all its borrowers are women - a complete reversal of conventional banking which focuses on men.

"We saw that money that went to women brought so much more benefit to the family than the same amount going to the family through the man," Yunus says.

Analysts say households where women have borrowed from institutions like Grameen have been shown to invest more in education, nutrition and shelter, with broad knock-on effects.