Do emergency plans really protect women?

Unprecedented wildfires in Nova Scotia, more powerful and destructive fires across Canada, and rapidly melting permafrost in the North are vivid reminders that we live in an era of polycrisis. Perhaps many of us were naïve about it before the early eerie days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Restrictions on travel, shutdowns, stay-at-home orders, and curfews felt apocalyptic. We hung on the words of health officials. We scrolled our feeds for infection and death rates. We rearranged staples of our lives: work, school, holidays, faith gatherings. We waited on officials to make speeches to reassure us. To at least give us hope things weren’t as bad as they seemed. Some of us feared the worst. We had seen abuse rates spike and inequalities deepen for women and gender-diverse people in previous disasters, especially for the most vulnerable and marginalized. The 2013 floods in Alberta, the 2008 global economic crisis, the 2016 Fort McMurray fires. These events all led to higher rates of partner abuse, sexual assault, and other pervasive gender-based violence. Only a month into the 2020 pandemic, UN Women named surging rates of violence against women and girls a global “shadow pandemic.” They called on governments to take urgent action. The Signal for Help, an abuse prevention tool we launched in April 2020 to equip people to reach out for help without leaving a digital trace, went viral almost immediately. People shared it across social media millions of times over, all around the globe. This worry of rising abuse struck a worldwide nerve—and with good reason. Within a year, femicide rates in Canada increased by 20 per cent. Calls to police and crisis lines surged. Intimate partner violence increased in intensity and severity. Those already at higher risk of abuse with lesser access to support such as Black, Indigenous, racialized, lower income, and disabled women and gender-diverse people felt these impacts even more. Karen Campbell is the senior director of community initiatives and policy at the Canadian Women’s Foundation. Photograph courtesy of Karen Campbell To add to the pressures, those in precarious female-dominated service jobs—personal support work, cashiering, cleaning—could not work from home. These often racialized and newcomer workers would have to bear the brunt of greater risk of abuse on top of higher levels of illness and hardship. The movement of the COVID-19 virus was unpredictable. Its gendered impacts were not. Canada’s emergency plans do not do enough to factor this in, even now. They do not account for the unique ways diverse women and gender-diverse people experience crises. There’s a profound lack of consideration for gendered realities in national, provincial, and territorial emergency and pandemic plans. A review of 28 regional plans found that just two of 28 refer to “gender.” Just five mention “women” and only two refer to domestic violence. At the municipal level, where much of the response to disasters occurs, a review of 24 emergency planning documents found no reference to “women” or “gender” at all. The omission means that in times of crisis, those tasked with rolling out the emergency response are neither attuned to, nor trained to respond to, shared experiences of more than half the population. Organizations serving women and gender-diverse people reported that, months into the pandemic when disproportionate gendered impacts were impossible to ignore, local officials pressed for opportunities to consult with them. But the thick of crisis is the worst time to launch stakeholder consultation meetings. It puts already over-stretched community-based services under inordinate pressure while they scramble to close the gaps of inadequate pre-disaster planning. Fast-forward to May 2023, when a number of Ontario municipalities declared intimate partner violence an epidemic after several femicides, vowing to marshal funding to victim services. It's an important move, but it’s overdue. Our slowness to manage crisis—before, during, and after—costs lives and leads to untold trauma. It opens some fundamental questions: who exactly are our emergency plans for? Whose safety and livelihoods are they really designed to protect? When we have more than enough evidence to know crisis leads to gendered abuse and hardship, how is it that our crisis plans barely breathe a word for women, girls, and gender-diverse people? It’s about time we answer these questions honestly and transform our approach to emergency management and planning. The field remains male-dominated. Gender-based expertise is limited to a small pocket of mainly women within it. Consultation and collaboration with everyday women and marginalized people is exceedingly rare in planning processes. In that light, it can be no surprise that our plans don’t reflect reality or that the emergency management experts informing government policy are ill-equipped to represent diverse needs. Our federal government prioritizes the consideration of gendered realities in financial support for emergency preparedness through its Feminist International Assistance Policy. We need the same kinds of commitments for disaster and emergency response domestically. A nuanced understanding of how human beings in all our diversities live through crises and their aftermath is overdue. Equitable responses that don’t leave anyone behind are the only way we’ll be able get though. Karen Campbell is the senior director of community initiatives and policy at the Canadian Women’s Foundation. The Hill Times

Do emergency plans really protect women?

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Do emergency plans really protect women?

A nuanced understanding of how human beings in all our diversities live through crises and their aftermath is overdue.

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