Month: August 2018

Today, we know that while floods, droughts, fires, earthquakes and tsunamis do not discriminate on the grounds of caste, religion or gender, their impact is profoundly discriminatory. Studies have shown that it is women (and the poor and marginalised) who bear their heaviest burden.

Following a disaster, incidents of sexual and domestic violence shoot up and there is often a spike in the trafficking of children and women.Relief camps leave many women feeling vulnerable.(Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO)

When Swarna Rajagopalan, a political scientist who specialises in gender issues, mentioned the g-word at a meeting to discuss natural disasters, she was told curtly: “This is not about gender. It’s about an emergency.”

That was 10 years ago.

Today, we know that while floods, droughts, fires, earthquakes and tsunamis do not discriminate on the grounds of caste, religion or gender, their impact is profoundly discriminatory. Studies have shown that it is women (and the poor and marginalised) who bear their heaviest burden.

UNDP reports that women and girls are 14 times more likely to die in a disaster than men. The 2004 tsunami killed four times as many women as it did men while 90% of those who died in the 1991 Bangladesh flood were women, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Partly this is because women are not taught to swim or climb trees. Partly it’s because they are more likely to stay back to try and save children and elderly parents.

And in some cases, says Rajagopalan who co-edited a book, Women and Disasters in South Asia, women were tragically trapped in their own long hair and saris.

Interestingly, a 2008 study of natural disasters in 141 countries finds that in societies where women and men enjoy equal rights, the number of deaths were the same.

It’s not just mortality. Following a disaster, incidents of sexual and domestic violence shoot up and there is often a spike in the trafficking of children and women.

Relief camps leave many women feeling vulnerable. In Kerala, says The News Minute founder-editor Dhanya Rajendran, relief camps have been segregated and so far, there have been no untoward reports, barring one incident, not at a camp but a girl’s hostel in Chengannur.

Yet, even in the camps, “Sanitation is a serious issue as there is only one stinking toilet,” says Rajendran. “Even if you get hold of a sanitary napkin, where are you supposed to dispose of it?”

And then comes the long haul of rebuilding lives. Inevitably, the additional responsibility of caring for the injured, sick and elderly will fall on women.

In some cases they will do so as new widows; in all cases they will do it from a weakened financial position.

But women are not just victims. They can play a key role in reconstruction, says Rajagopalan.

Kerala, already high on human development indices, now has a unique opportunity in how it designs its reconstruction. What position will it give to women?

By involving them in planning, the state will be able to develop a new generation of women leaders and also provide a paradigm.

Already, activist Sunitha Krishnan has announced that her organisation will help in rebuilding the poorest homes by sending in a team of welders and carpenters.

All of them will be women.

@NamitaBhandare writes on social issues

The views expressed are personal

Muzaffarpur is emblematic of the large-scale systemic abuse of institutionalised children that we choose not to see

Brajesh Thakur, main accused in the Muzaffarpur shelter home case , after a woman allegedly threw ink on his face while he was being taken to a special POCSO court, in Muzaffarpur, August 8(PTI)

One fought with her stepmother and ran away from home. Another was sold into prostitution and rescued in a raid. And a third was brought in by her mother who was too poor to feed her.

The girls who end up at shelter homes are, very often, nobody’s children; society’s most vulnerable. They have no one to ask, are you okay?

Not even the State whose job it is to protect them.

While the scale of horror at the state-funded hell house shelter in Muzaffarpur run by the politically connected Brajesh Thakur is staggering — 29 of 42 minor girls reporting rape, torture and being drugged — it is not unprecedented.

We saw it in 2012 when girls and women were found raped, beaten and abused at a government-funded Rohtak orphanage.

We saw it in 2007 when the Supreme Court began hearing a petition based on a news report on the sexual abuse of children in Tamil Nadu orphanages filed by Anjali Sinha of Hindustan, the sister publication of this newspaper.

Ten years after that case began, a two-judge bench in May 2017 ordered the government to ensure registration of all child care institutions, minimum care standards under the Juvenile Justice Act of 2016, and the setting up of inspection committees by the end of the year.

Yet, a year later, nine states, including Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (where reports of sexual abuse at a home in Deoria have emerged), said they could not have their child shelters audited by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. News reports say 1,339 homes had not even completed registration formalities. “It’s shocking that not a single social audit had been done till the 2017 court order,” says amicus curie Aparna Bhat.

State apathy apart, what accounts for the lack of a widespread public demand to overhaul this broken system?

Muzaffarpur is not an isolated case but emblematic of a systemic rot: Politically connected people win lucrative contracts to run shelter homes with no real monitoring and rampant abuse, including by those officials appointed to protect the children. How many times are we going to hear this story?

A social audit of 110 homes conducted by Tata Institute of Social Services (TISS) at the behest of the state government, red-flagged 15 in a report submitted to the government in April.

It doesn’t take some special superpower to find out if children are being abused. You only have to ask. The TISS audit ensured that the children were interviewed privately and a relationship of trust built over time. All it took was a willingness to listen and believe.

Muzaffarpur is a “litmus test”, says Mohammad Tarique of TISS — for judges and police, bureaucrats and politicians, child rights activists and citizens. “A lot of children suffer in silence because they believe they are powerless,” he says.

It’s up to us to tell them they are not alone.

Namita Bhandare writes on social issues

The views expressed are personal