In my previous piece, I elaborated on the presence of a strong association between weak resilience to disasters and gender inequality. However, there remains a third dimension within this already complicated dynamic that is left undiscussed: corruption.
When floods hit the Kosi region of Bihar, the social exclusion of marginalized groups within India operated under a fragile socio-political state structure. Consequently, researchers discovered that the governance system and the social structure based on the hierarchical determinants of gender and socioeconomic status have weakened the resilience of women and men within marginalized groups in effectively responding to Kosi floods.
Particularly, the threats of the existence of these social vulnerabilities were evaluated based on the personal narratives of people from marginalized groups of the community, especially women and children in poor households, who were denied access to receive nutritious resources and to be admitted for direct hospitalization.
A Dalit woman (i.e. woman from one of the lowest social classes in India) cried while expressing her distress in the following manner: “When will people understand we are also human beings…We need food and water…Our children also get thirsty and feel hungry.”
Conducting an evaluation on the global humanitarian consequences of natural disasters between 1980 and 2004 has reported 1,551,000 people killed and 4,710,000,000 people affected. Unfortunately, the shocking statistics recorded in both categories mostly included poor people, women, and children in countries under adverse social, political, and economic conditions, which served as reliable evidence of the corresponding restrictive governmental systems and humanitarian agencies to provide equal access to rescue services, medical resources, food supply, and emergency hospitalizations.
The remarkable failure of some nations to respond to natural disasters has uncovered the rooted conditions that resulted in generating poor disaster response measures. Specifically, the extremity of nation corruption constitutes one of the major barriers to the success of community-based disaster responses, particularly through generating a remarkable hierarchical discrepancy in multiple aspects of one significant social dimension: gender equality.
In countries grounded in civil war, ethnic, and tribal conflict, social organization within citizens of the same community breaks down according to the evolutionary theory of “the survival of the fittest”. As a result, the strike of humanitarian disasters within such communities drives people to normalize chronic forms of violence that aim to ensure one’s basic survival needs.
Stemming from the prevalent gender stereotypes, weak social networks allow more men to exhibit such uncivilized and brutal actions compared to women — with the normalization of rape, sexual assault, harassment, and homicide. Accordingly, no sanctions will be available to punish these perpetrators throughout the absence of reliable disaster response measures that initially plan and account for such dehumanizing incidents to occur in the first place.
Taking the sample of affected people into account, a significant proportion of the morbidity and mortality rates constituted single women who were both the breadwinners and primary care providers of their children, thus suffering from financial hardships to provide for their children their basic survival resources, which placed them at the lowest level of the social hierarchy and increased their susceptibility to gender inequality throughout responding to disasters.
In Puerto Rico (PR), the COVID-19 pandemic hit at a time where an economic crisis, bankruptcy, state-corporate crimes, and human rights violations were taking place, along with swarms of earthquakes hitting the region. Coupled together, this undermined the capacity of PR authorities to respond to the hospitalizations and mortalities resulting from COVID-19, while also limiting the supply of COVID-19 test-kits, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical interventions to citizens. Unfortunately, this places more rigid restrictions on elderly, migrant, and queer women. The Puerto Rican triple threat is not alien to us Lebanese citizens.
Action plans must be developed to increase gender sensitivity during community-based disaster responses while also decreasing corruption in different sectors of the community.
For starters, arranging awareness programs from globally accredited non-governmental organizations (NGOs) would implement a holistic educational approach. Successful disaster response plans can be taught and then applied to citizens of all different social, occupational, and financial sectors.
What is also essential is organizing resistance campaigns against corrupt politicians. This demands an upheaval onto re-electing trustworthy, professional, and trained prime ministers on disaster management planning. Ideally, these elections would run on the equal selection of qualified men and women candidates.
Moreover, integrating elderly, migrant, queer, poor, and single women into holistic community-based approaches that operate on effective disaster response measures would gradually reduce the local mortality rates. This would further promote the inclusion of marginalized sectors within one community.
There is a need for the holistic application of implications and corresponding action plans onto Lebanese citizens, corrupt politicians, and NGO volunteers. After all, we do suffer from the three ailments of corruption, gender inequality, and the absence of pre-planned effective disaster responses. The corrupt governmental system left the Lebanese people suffering from diverse types of stressors that impair their ability and strength to withstand local disasters, which becomes even more difficult to deal with among marginalized groups of women.