A Planet in Crisis Is ‘Particularly Dangerous’ for Women and Girls

When Cyclone Winston ravaged the island nation of Fiji in 2016, it came with 185-mile-per-hour winds and a massive storm surge that displaced thousands, and took away the livelihoods of thousands more. Amid the downed palm trees and debris, people became hungry and desperate.

Winston is considered one of the worst storms ever recorded, according to Australia’s Climate Council, with its wind speeds and flooding exacerbated by climate change. And as in any major climate disaster, a loss of buildings and jobs led to homelessness, a lack of resources, and greater violence against women, girls, and people of differing gender identities.

“There is mounting evidence from across the world — from sub-Saharan Africa to the Pacific to the U.S. — that the impacts of a changing climate are particularly dangerous for women and girls — and anyone without the privilege and ready resources and safety nets to cope,” said Cate Owren, the senior gender program manager of the Global Program on Governance and Rights at the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Specifically, “Child marriage increases, transactional survival sex increases, and intimate partner and domestic violence increase when pressures mount over increasingly scarce resources,” Owren told WMC Climate. “These are crisis situations that will have impacts for generations.”

And these nightmares don’t just happen in poorer countries. For instance, domestic violence markedly increased during the Australian bushfires over the summer, and sexualized violence was a scourge during Hurricane Katrina in the U.S.

In addition to women and girls, indigenous and LGBTQ people face increased violence because of climate change. When economies break down and stress goes up, people tend to take their anger out on the most vulnerable — and many indigenous and LGBTQ people are firmly in that category globally. In many disasters, their already societally and economically difficult circumstances only get worse.

“Straight after [Tropical Cyclone] Winston, whenever we came past these people, they would call out that it is ‘us people’ that caused TC Winston,” an unidentified Vacasalewalewa person of alternative gender told Edge Effect, an Australia-based organization that helps humanitarian and development groups to work with sexual and gender minorities. “I asked them, ‘What people?’ And they said LGBTQ people. I told them it is climate change, not LGBTQ people.”

But perhaps it is easier to blame the people already down when knocked out yourself.

Here are some climate disasters that led to rape, sex-trafficking, and increased child marriage, among other forms of gender-based violence:

Hurricane Katrina created a petri dish for sexualized violence.

Disasters like Hurricane Katrina make women even more vulnerable than usual to sexual assault. Crowded, understaffed shelters, insufficient lighting, increased tension, and general chaos lead to attacks.

In New Orleans in 2005, the hurricane forced people into precarious shelters, such as the roof of a school in the city’s Ninth Ward, where singer-songwriter Charmaine Neville (daughter of Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers band) took refuge with others during the flooding. A 2007 paper by researchers at Loyola University New Orleans quoted Neville describing her rape on that roof. She said she was just one of a number of women violated there. What she wanted people to understand, she said, was “that if we had not been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn’t have happened.”

Of all the sexual assaults that took place during Katrina, about a third were at evacuation centers, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center found in a survey. New Orleans’s Superdome stadium, where as many as 16,000 people sheltered, was the site of sexual assault as well. Reports vary as to how many cases there were, but advocates and scholars both agree that they occurred.

“What you had was a situation where you've got a tremendous number of vulnerable people, and then some predatory people who had all of the reasons to take their anger out on someone else,” Judy Benitez, the executive director of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault, told NPR. “Drug and alcohol use is another contributing factor, and no police presence to prevent them from doing whatever they wanted to, to whomever they wanted to.”

Baby supplies and sanitary pads ran low, according to news reports. One mother told The Seattle Times that she’d been given two diapers and told to scrape them off when they got dirty.

The majority of women suffering in Katrina were women of color, who lived at a higher level of poverty than their white neighbors and often had sole custody of children. “More than half the poor families in the city were headed by single mothers,” Jacquelyn Litt, professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, told BBC News.

The women were “reliant on interdependent community networks for their everyday survival and resources. The displacement that happened after Katrina essentially eroded those networks,” Litt said, placing women and their children at “much greater risk.”

Tar sands extraction led to the rape and murder of indigenous women.

As the oil industry grows, so do the “man camps” surrounding its extraction sites and pipelines. These areas of temporary housing draw men from around the world who have no connection to the local community — and who have been linked to a sharp rise in gender-based violence and femicide, particularly against indigenous and aboriginal women.

While this spike in violence against women is happening globally at extraction sites, the Tar Sands region in Northern Alberta, Canada, is a kind of ground zero. The area is located near the traditional lands of a number of First Nations, including the Cree and Chipewyan, and aboriginal people like the Metis.

In 2019, the Canadian government called the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women a “genocide.” Its National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls found a “persistent and deliberate pattern of systemic racial and gendered human and Indigenous-rights violations and abuses, perpetuated historically and maintained today by the Canadian state, designed to displace Indigenous people from their lands, social structures and governments, and to eradicate their existence as nations, communities, families and individuals.”

Indigenous and aboriginal groups estimate that at least 4,000 women went missing or were murdered in Canada over the past three decades, many of them in connection to the man camps. Also, sexual assault, harassment, and sex-trafficking are known to increase around the sites.

As for the U.S., in an area at the border of Montana and North Dakota, thousands of men flowed through the Bakken oil fields, where incidences of sexualized violence, sex-trafficking, intimate partner violence against indigenous women spiked between 2006 and 2012, the period of peak extraction, according to a 2019 Bureau of Justice Statistics report. Overall, more than 1 in 3 native women in the country were being raped, stalked, or beaten each year — which is about twice the rate for Americans of other ethnicities. The rate of sexualized and other violence against native men is nearly the same.

The earthquake in Haiti triggered an epidemic of sexualized violence.

On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti, killing hundreds of thousands, leaving the capital of Port-au-Prince in ruins and internally displacing more than a million people into overcrowded, squalid tent encampments numbering around 1,300.

The United Nations Population Fund estimated that some 750,000 women and girls of childbearing age were affected by the disaster.

Amnesty International said that hundreds of women had been raped in the camps, calling it “a humanitarian crisis.” The group pointed to a lack of police presence and security as a major reason why so many women were attacked.

“Sexual violence was widespread in Haiti before January 2010,” Amnesty wrote, “but this has been exacerbated by the conditions since the earthquake. The limited assistance the authorities previously provided has been undermined by the destruction of police stations and court houses. This has made it more difficult to report sexual violence.”

A woman named Suzie told the group that she was assaulted in the middle of the night in her makeshift shelter, where she was living with her two sons and a friend, in the middle of the night. The two women were blindfolded and gang-raped in front of the children.

“After they left, I didn’t do anything,” Suzie said. “I didn’t have any reaction…Women victims of rape should go to hospital but I didn’t because I didn’t have any money… I don’t know where there is a clinic offering treatment for victims of violence.”

The Los Angeles Times called the post-earthquake sexualized violence “crimes of opportunity, but increasingly they seem a calculated, predatory form of stalking and attacking.” The paper also reported that some camp leaders, always men, would demand sexual favors in return for tents, food, and building materials. Other perpetrators were “uneducated, unemployed men who populate the camps, often stoned and with time on their hands.”

Cyclones Idai and Kenneth led to increased violence against women.

Two 2019 cyclones successively bashed into Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, three of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, according to the Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative.

Cyclones Idai and Kenneth hit women, girls, LBTQ, and gender-nonconforming people, among others, the hardest, the Global Fund for Women reported. Among the challenges these groups faced include increased sexualized violence, unsafe labor, and an inability to reach medical centers, the fund said, estimating that nearly half a million women were affected by Idai alone. Among these women, at least 75,000 were pregnant, and 7,000 of them were estimated by UNICEF to be facing “life-threatening complications due to the flooding and destruction.”

Menstruation also always becomes a problem for women and girls in the aftermath of severe destruction. One, because there is little privacy, and two, because they often do not have access to sanitary pads, or even clean water.

Care International spoke to Susana Manuel, 36, a mother of three in Mozambique: “When using pieces of capulana [a traditional cloth wrap] or articles of clothing as pads, we feel uncomfortable. When we are sitting or walking, we hear people calling us to say our clothes are dirty or there is blood on it. I am afraid to face health risks as there less toilets for women, and during menstruation the hygiene in the toilets is bad.”

Devastating storms like Idai in March 2019, and Kenneth in April 2019, are more common than ever, and experts expect such storms to become even worse and more frequent.

Drought in Kenya is driving an increase in child marriage.

In 2013, Kenya’s government committed to eliminating child marriage in the country by the end of 2020, but climate change derailed that target as desperate families, driven by hunger, were pulling their daughters out of school and marrying them off in exchange for dowries.

A growing body of research, including 2020 data from UNFPA, USAID, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, links extreme climate phenomena, such as increasingly frequent and prolonged drought, to a resurgence of dowry practices in Kenya.

In Kenya’s traditional, pastoralist communities, the droughts have meant shrinking pastureland for livestock and, with it, hunger, thirst, and disease. Kenya scored 36th among countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, according to 2018 data from the University of Notre Dame’s Global Adaptation Initiative Index —and 152nd for readiness to handle those effects.

“To cope, desperate families are increasingly pulling their daughters from school and marrying them off in exchange for dowries — typically comprised of new clothes, drums of fresh milk and several camels,” wrote Neha Wadekar in Time magazine.

Typhoon Haiyan fueled sexualized violence and trafficking.

Typhoon Haiyan, which made landfall in the central island regions of the Philippines on Nov. 8, 2013, was the largest typhoon ever recorded, reportedly killing more than 6,000 people (64 percent of whom were women, according to U.N. Climate Change) with its winds and tsunami-like storm surge, and displacing more than 4 million people.

As cities in affected regions began to slowly rebuild, displaced women and girls became vulnerable to sexualized violence and trafficking. UNFPA estimated that 5,000 women were exposed to such violence in December alone.

A 2015 report from the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development found that trafficking rates in the east-central Leyte province, at the center of the destruction, increased after Haiyan. Without any viable income opportunities, women were forced into trafficking to provide food for their families after the typhoon.

“GBV and the specific needs of women and girls were not consistently taken into account,” concluded a report from the What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls Global Program. “And at every stage of the response, across every sector, violence against women and girls “was considered to be a secondary concern – rather than a life-saving priority for women, girls, and communities.”

(Frances Nguyen contributed reporting.)