Marginalized groups often suffer disproportionately in the aftermath of a natural disaster, reports the world's largest humanitarian agency. Minority groups, women, the disabled, and the elderly are most vulnerable, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says, because embedded discrimination makes these groups largely invisible to aid agencies and governments in times of crisis. As a consequence, they often face greater impoverishment, disability, and fatality after a disaster.
The report finds that natural disasters are on the rise--after slightly decreasing last year to an annual total of 427, this year's tally has already reached nearly 500, making 2007 a record year for natural disasters. Humanitarian workers, both governmental and private, that provide relief in these disasters are charged with the responsibility of quickly and accurately determining who is vulnerable and who receives aid, and following through on aid distribution. However, a quick response relies largely on existing official population data, in which marginalized groups can be invisible. In addition, the means of distributing aid or providing shelter may exclude groups or put them at risk--for instance, elderly individuals may not be able to travel long distances to food distribution points; shelters may not be accessible to disabled persons; minority groups may experience violence and theft of aid supplies by more powerful groups.
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'The Most Vulnerable and Discriminated Category' Among the four groups it examines, the report says women continue to be at the greatest risk in a natural disaster. Disasters may be more often fatal to women because of built-in societal norms. For instance, flooding often kills women unequally because they are less mobile than men and are not taught to swim. When Bangladesh was ravaged by a cyclone and flood in 1991, it was reported that five times more women died than men. In addition, disaster recovery presents specific challenges for women. Women often have little say in how aid is distributed, and their public participation may be so scorned that they don't even vocalize their own family's needs. For women that were widowed in the South Asia earthquake in October 2005, access to relief and recovery packages became difficult, and their female-headed households faced long-lasting discrimination. Finally, the report says, with every disaster that causes displacement the risk of physical violence to women and girls is greatly heightened. This violence encompasses sexual violence, forced prostitution, and domestic violence, among other manifestations. Such gender-based violence displayed an alarming rise after Hurricane Katrina devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, where the rape rate was 53 times higher than the highest baseline rate in Mississippi. |
What Aid Agencies Can Do
The report emphasizes that more thorough disaster planning is needed to account for marginalized groups in advance of a crisis. Such planning would benefit from:
- More accurate national census data, which includes marginal groups
- Cooperation between aid agencies to create needs assessments of minorities
- Processes to enable minority groups to participate in the planning and execution of emergency programs
- Campaigns to fight existing discrimination broadly within communities
The report emphasizes that though discrimination is deeply rooted, it's within human power to change. So while natural disasters can't be avoided, the unequal risks created by discrimination can be: as the report's first chapter says, "Disasters do not discriminate; people do."
RELATED LINKS
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
EM-DAT: The International Disaster Database
EarthTrends
Female literacy rate as a percentage of male literacy rate, by country
