Lack of clean water tied to rape in the Solomon Islands

On any given day, women around the world will find themselves in danger of rape while performing the most basic acts of survival. Acts borne of necessity, such as fetching clean water for cooking or washing, or gathering firewood, often leave women vulnerable to rape and gender-based violence as they are forced to venture to remote areas. Yet these types of chores are overwhelmingly performed by women, as they are considered to be part of the domestic sphere.

In the Solomon Islands, a former protectorate of Britain that endured a civil war between 1998 and 2003 and earlier violence during World War II, the problem is severe. Particularly for women living in urban slums, the threat of sexualized violence while walking to or from collecting water is very real—and many, many women and girls must do so due to practically non-existent infrastructure.

Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands. As the vast majority of houses here do not have a supply of water, women must fetch water from neighboring areas and broken pipes, and are often raped while doing so. (Friars Balsam)

An Amnesty International report focusing on the problem of clean water and sexualized violence in the country cites a 2009 paper that found that 92 percent of households surveyed in Honiara, the country’s capital, did not have a water supply. Not only was there no running water or well at the vast majority of the capital city’s homes, but often the closest source was a broken pipe far away: Women and girls walked “several kilometres” in order to reach the pipe.

As the PeaceWomen Project, an organization that works on peace and security in conflict and post-conflict areas and the role of women in preventing war, reports, women seeking water in the Solomon Islands are “continually harassed, attacked and raped.”

According to PeaceWomen, Joycelyn Lai from the Young Women’s Christian Association in the Solomon Islands spoke on the issue at the Amnesty report’s launch.

“Rape cases in the Solomon Islands are like everyday activities,” Lai said. She explained that a daily paper even publishes so-called “danger zones” where women cannot walk safely at night.

While the problem in the Solomon Islands has recently garnered attention, with much of the country’s population having been displaced due to conflict and thus living in slums without water, sexualized violence committed against women and girls while they are collecting supplies is not new, nor is it limited to any one region or conflict. As we wrote last year, there is a long, ongoing crisis of sexualized violence at the very places meant to provide safety from conflict: refugee and displaced person camps. And the problem seems especially bad when women and girls seek out water and firewood.

Like the slums in post-conflict Solomon Islands, overcrowded camps in places like Darfur, Bosnia, and the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya often do not have safe drinking water or sufficient wood for cooking. A similar pattern has been seen across eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where, near camps like Mugunga, about a dozen kilometers outside of Goma, women have routinely been raped while gathering supplies.

These cases do not represent outliers. At camps, women and girls are raped by local militia members, fellow inhabitants, and, as we’ve reported previously, peacekeepers themselves.

Meanwhile, in the Solomon Islands, Amnesty reports a number of cases in which the perpetrators were the victim’s neighbors, boys from a nearby settlement who committed repeated attacks. Until infrastructure issues have been improved and violence combated on multiple levels, women in the Solomon Islands will continue to be forced to gamble their own physical, mental, and emotional safety for the sake of drinking water.