Ending gender-based violence in disasters (3)

Last Saturday, Dec. 10, was International Human Rights Day, commemorating the day the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. It also capped the 16-day campaign to end all forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls, initiated by the UN Women. UN Women claims that “violence against women and girls remains the most pervasive human rights violation in the world, affecting more than one in three women—a figure that has remained largely unchanged over the last decade.”

Currently, natural disasters are occurring more frequently than before; taking place in impoverished and politically marginalized communities in different parts of the world. UN Women noted such phenomena have aggravated the risk factors facing young women and girls and other vulnerable groups in contexts of violent conflict.

In 2013, I led a small research team to examine and analyze the situation of internally displaced communities in three locations in Central Mindanao: Cotabato City, Maasim municipality in Sarangani province, and in Datu Piang, Maguindanao del Sur province. Brookings Institution based in Washington, DC, in collaboration with the London School of Economics Project on Internal Displacement commissioned this study. It included narratives and analyses of internal displacement and livelihood contexts in three countries: Azerbaijan, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), and the Philippines, using Mindanao as a case study. I led the Mindanao case study team for this project.

The main reason for the evacuation of communities in the three locations was to escape from the crossfire of both vertical and horizontal (communal) conflicts. However, informants also narrated that they often had to deal with two “rains” that pushed them to flee for safety. These are rain (water) and a hail of bullets exchanged by two warring parties (either between the Philippine government forces and rebel groups and members of two families in vengeance fighting, popularly known in Mindanao studies literature as “rido”). In their places of evacuation, community members narrated how difficult it was to be scampering for safety, as they had to dodge bullets from the warring groups and avoid being exposed to rain and floodwaters while fleeing.

Being in a “strange” new location makes evacuee families highly vulnerable to scheming individuals who exploit their lack of physical, livelihood, and food security. Sadly, among these were their distant relatives, who had recruited young girls from the evacuee families to work in urban areas—like General Santos City (South Cotabato) or in Davao City. Two girls from these evacuee families in Cotabato City were recruited to work abroad, but as it turned out, the two young girls ended up as sex slaves of rich Chinese businessmen who traveled on cruise ships during their vacation. Surprisingly, the parents of the two girls expressed tacit approval of what happened to their daughters. They rationalized: “it is okay for us; the two girls have sent badly needed cash to us.”

An indigenous woman, in one of our study locations, revealed how she became part of the bride price of her brother. Her brother wanted to marry a girl from a more affluent family in their community. But her parents did not have enough money to pay for the bride price; she was exchanged as the bride of the male sibling of her brother’s future wife. As such, she was not entitled to her own bride price. She was just 13 years old then.

Young girls who are raped in places of evacuation tend to keep silent about what happened to them. They are advised by male relatives, including their own siblings, to consent to offers of marriage from their perpetrators to avoid being shamed.

These are among the saddest examples of how girls and young women are being treated in contexts of natural and human-induced disasters. But being made to marry their rapists to eschew family shame is the height of misogyny. It is a gross violation of the rights of the victimized women to seek redress for the heinous crime committed against them. It is an expression of toxic masculinity—that men can easily rationalize and “pay” for the crime of rape by marrying their victims.

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