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Surviving Domestic Violence and Disaster
Survivre à la violence familiale et aux désastres

by Elaine Enarson, Visiting Scholar
Disaster Preparedness Resources Centre University of British Columbia

When Hurricane Andrew destroyed their apartment, belongings, car, and workplaces, Carol's husband "Just went berserk. . . he really went crazy. Before, I would get beat up maybe once a month if I was lucky. Afterward, it was like every other day. . . . I ran across a lot of women suffering, too, with their children-husbands beating them up and leaving them. It was pretty bad."

Women like Carol were less safe than ever from violence in their own homes after a predictable event nobody thought would ever really happen in a major metropolitan area. What makes women in volatile relationships so vulnerable when disasters transform geographies, institutions, and relationships? How well prepared are grassroots women's services to respond to women and children residing in shelters or transition homes during disasters or to women facing violence after a major disaster?

With funding from the BC Institute Against Family Violence and the Feminist Research, Education, Development & Action Centre, an action research project was designed to answer these questions. Seventy-seven Canadian and US provincial and state coalitions, shelters and transition homes responded to a mail and phone survey, including 35 programs in the British Columbia/Yukon Society of Transition Homes. With their help, we now have baseline data on women at risk both of violence and disaster.

Violence Against Women in Disaster : What are the Issues?

Once considered the great "leveler," we now know that environmental and technological disasters hit people disproportionately hard, among them the poor, subordinated racial or ethnic groups, single parents, minority-language speakers, recent migrants, children, the elderly, and disabled persons. Women's disaster vulnerability has recently been recognized but it will not surprise readers to learn that pets, tourists, and cultural artifacts receive more attention than battered women in the disaster literature.

Disasters have no single impact on women. Paradoxically, a family home destroyed by fire may loosen the ties binding women to violent partners; disaster relief money can buy a bus ticket out of town for women ready to leave; and responding to catastrophe may reduce abuse temporarily. More than simply victims, battered women develop survival skills which need investigation in disaster contexts.

But living with the "daily disaster" of domestic violence puts women at special risk before, during, and after disaster. In the vicious dynamic of power and control, theirs is a world of increasingly narrow social networks, isolation, and financial dependence. Like their physical and emotional health, women's sense of self-worth and efficacy diminishes in the face of continued violence. As one shelter worker noted, fragile support systems can make battered women even more vulnerable after disaster.

Severe weather events like mudslides or blizzards isolate women at home in unsafe environments without working telephones or accessible roads; contact with courts and crisis counselors may be lost when major disasters disrupt or destroy lifeline services, including law enforcement agencies. Relationship stress factors increase when families struggle to replace lost possessions, housing, jobs, and peace of mind; a counselor working with men after a California earthquake observed that "many men used the quake as a way to get themselves back into an old relationship." For women and children in shelter, mandatory evacuation following an industrial accident or in advance of wild fire is a second-order evacuation, and designated evacuation or relief centres may not protect their privacy or safety.

When the dust clears or the waters recede, women coping with physical and/or emotional abuse must compete with other impacted residents for scarce housing, child care, employment, education, transportation, and health services. Affordable housing stocks are likely to decline after disaster, forcing some women back into unsafe conditions and ultimately back into counseling and court. Ironically, relief funds may be more available to the abuser remaining at home than to women living in shelter.

Putting Disaster on the Agenda in Battered Women's Programs

"What we give them is all that they have," one worker said of her shelter. As shelters and transition homes are not generally recognized as housing and serving an especially vulnerable population, their self-reliance through disaster preparedness is critical.

Programs responding to the survey rarely reported receiving any official information on disaster preparation or being represented on local, regional, or provincial disaster planning groups. How safe are their centres, shelters or transition homes? Most reported their physical facilities "relatively safe" although they may be older buildings centrally located in hazardous coastal or flood plain areas. A number of British Columbia programs in a known earthquake zone reported that their facility was "relatively safe" but added, "not safe in the event of earthquake."

Disaster planning is not a priority for domestic violence programs working hard at "securing basic needs for women and children, e.g. safety, housing, etc." Fewer than half reported taking any steps toward disaster readiness. In British Columbia and the Yukon Territory, a region at risk of flooding, mudslide, transportation accidents, and severe weather events, with major metropolitan areas at risk of earthquake, 80% of the 35 responding programs reported either no preparedness steps (12 of 35) or only minimal steps (16 of 35). Among these are six programs which each sheltered between 500-600 women and children during the last fiscal year. Asked about the primary barriers to greater disaster readiness, they reported the obvious: "Time and money. Demand for our services is very high and no increases in funding are like funding cuts to us." Lack of knowledge about regional disaster response and lack of community leadership were also cited. Insensitivity to domestic violence issues may frustrate the initiative of some programs, as in this account from an earthquake-zone transition home: "I called earthquake readiness at city hall and we didn't have a big enough group to warrant a meeting. They wanted us to organize our block or neighbors. I don't have the time to worry about safety issues. Besides, we live in an upscale neighborhood that doesn't like us very much."

Where disaster preparedness was more extensive, it was encouraged by personal relationships with local emergency responders (especially in rural communities), prior disaster experience on the part of key staff members, government mandate, and coalition leadership. For example, in one rural North Dakota town the local emergency team includes both the shelter manager and her police officer husband; in rural British Columbia, one woman was both an Emergency Social Services volunteer and a shelter worker, and a program serving indigenous women reported receiving disaster information from their local band.

As the Red River rose last April, program staff in Grand Forks struggled to sandbag their homes, centre and city, but ultimately lost all three. Downriver in Winnipeg, shelter staff tried to prepare their facilities against sewer back up and flooding but supplies were scarce. In addition to reallocating shelter space to protect equipment and supplies, the two local shelters worked creatively under pressure to locate local safe space large enough to keep clients and staff together in the event of emergency evacuation. Just before the river crested, however, out-of-area evacuation plans were substituted by their major funding agency, bringing conflicting views of client service and autonomy into sharp relief: "They are our clients and can choose... Who has the say?"

As the Red River Valley flood indicated, critical decisions were made on the run, in communities located on a known flood plain but unprepared for protecting battered women and their children in emergencies. Disaster planning cannot make people safe from the "flood of the century" or other disasters, but can minimize loss and enable people and organizations to cope more effectively with extreme conditions.

Doing More With Less: How Disasters Impact Domestic Violence Work

When disaster strikes, shelters must and do respond flexibly to extraordinary conditions. "Scattered all over the countryside," staff and volunteers in Grand Forks struggled to keep the crisis line open and later cleaned up the "slippery, slimy, smelly mud" which destroyed the center's costly office equipment. Fourteen women shared one room and two phones for three months in a small office on the campus of the local university. Six months later, they learned their new site is now located on the wrong site of a planned new dike, displacing them again. In the wake of flooding in Saguenay, Quebec, shelter staff reported: "Everything actually came to a standstill. The police services were overworked and stretched. There were no phones, no electricity, no water. All the energy was spent fending off the most immediate problems and responding to essential needs. It required great flexibility on the part of the staff."

Under these conditions, does the incidence of reported violence against women also increase? Simple causal effects, for example on employment rates or migration patterns, are difficult to attribute to events as complex and long-lasting as major natural or technological disasters. In severely disrupted areas lacking functioning telephones, courts, or responding police officers, indicators like requests for protection orders or numbers of crisis line calls may be inadequate. Few domestic violence programs have record-keeping systems in place to distinguish and track disaster-relevant calls. Nonetheless, increased domestic violence has been reported by domestic violence programs hit by disaster in California, Florida, Missouri, and, most recently, in the wake of the devastating ice storms in Quebec and Ontario.

In this study, nine of the 13 most severely impacted programs reported that demand increased as long as six months or a year after the event. Hit by flooding in late April, the Grand Forks program reported that crisis calls rose by 21% and counseling of on-going clients by 59% between July l996 and July l997; they processed an additional 18% more protection orders in August, l997 than in August l996. Staff also reported more referrals from emergency rooms, suggesting a rise in physical assaults. Upriver in Fargo, sister programs reported a similar pattern as they struggled to cope with flood-displaced families moving into their area, out-of-town relief workers, and new referrals from disaster holiness. Downriver in Canada, where two small communities were flooded and Winnipeg sandbagged against the flood threat, programs documented no flood-induced increase in service demand six months after the crisis.

Impacted programs reported greatly increased case management with existing clients. In the case below, lack of housing forced a woman back into an unsafe situation: "One woman had gotten a protection order right before the flood and then when the evacuation was taking place, she really didn't have... family around here, her support system was very small. And so, because of that, she contacted him... She felt like she was forced into the situation and then things got bad and she had to get out of that situation so it created even more problems." Because the local shelter was destroyed, she sought protection at a friend's home and turned again to her local crisis intervention center for support. As the Saguenay program reported, their main challenge came not from new cases of disaster-induced violence but a "great increase in crisis management." A second program in the region also reported that court cases were postponed, women stayed longer in the shelter, and women were displaced from transitional housing.

While postdisaster assistance is often very generous and domestic violence programs reported many donations, most noted that the "sympathy factor" is short-lived but disaster recovery complex and long-lasting. In North Dakota, programs reported both private and government funds were redirected away from domestic violence to "flood victims."

When floods, fires, or toxic contamination disrupt a large area, shelters must respond to women without the assistance of other local shelters, motels, safe homes, public transportation, legal advice, housing and other social services. Disrupted courts and overburdened police officers not only put women at risk but increase demands on stressed shelter workers; six months after the Red River crested in Grand Forks, staff reported it was still a "huge struggle" and a long drive to a different courthouse to get protection orders signed. Programs lose funding when planned fundraising events must be cancelled or postponed, and volunteers and board members often withdraw their labour, if only temporarily. Many respondents reported staff overload when some staff members needed release time to protect their homes and families or to make repairs. Only one program, located on the Gulf Coast of Texas where severe weather is common, reported personnel guidelines in place specifying leave and salary policies for disaster-impacted staff.

Disasters mean hard work for residents, emergency responders, local governments -and women's advocates. Programs responded to disaster-hit sister programs by taking in clients, replacing supplies, and sharing resources. Some expanded their mission to include housing evacuated families and relief workers (e.g. nurses caring for premature infants from an evacuated hospital). One BC program responded with critical-incident stress debriefing and another prepared lists of counselors and offered their services to the local emergency response team when their area was threatened by flooding. A California shelter distributed free emergency kits and flyers through their regular public education programs after a major earthquake; another received funding to integrate emergency preparedness materials into "life information materials" offered to stabilized residents to help them "get on with their lives." The slowly-developing Missouri flood made possible a statewide coordinated response which included the domestic violence coalition; this initiative led to the modification of an existing grant for substance abuse in the disaster recovery period to include domestic violence services.

Organizations with staff who are experienced at operating a shelter for displaced people in crisis, collecting and distributing personal and household goods, advocating for crisis intervention and recovery services, placing homeless families in shelter, and running a crisis line are an important part of community capacity to respond to disaster. However, a frustrated shelter manager complained that local emergency planners "don't really think about us."

Making Women Safer: An Integrated Community Response

Most programs would like to do more, including ensuring that their facility is included in existing emergency plans (72%), providing staff disaster training (68%), attending area meetings on preparedness (64%), and developing emergency plans and written protocols with other agencies (60%). Emergency managers will find this high degree of potential disaster readiness encouraging. But programs struggling to meet existing needs with limited or declining resources cannot move toward disaster readiness. Funding priorities in emergency response organizations as well as women's services must reflect and support the needs of women at risk of violence in disaster.

Specifically engaging those groups most vulnerable to disaster is an essential part of building disaster-resilient communities. Like other women vulnerable to disaster, women living with violence need services but also a seat at the table. Emergency practitioners accustomed to partnering with mainstream community organizations need to work with grassroots women's organizations serving at-risk populations. Preparedness programs designed for cohesive neighborhoods must include the insecurely housed like women and children in domestic violence and homeless shelters. Mental health and other field responders should receive training on domestic violence and disaster issues. In this regard, a strong battered women's movement articulating women's needs and interests before, during, and after disaster is a vital resource in disaster mitigation.

Just as disasters are not salient for most women's services, battered women's needs during disaster and recovery are not on the radar screen of most emergency managers. An integrated community response to women, violence, and disaster demands a new partnership between these two professional communities.

Toward this end, two sets of guidelines have been developed (available from the author) outlining disaster planning issues in shelters and action guidelines for shelters, coalitions, and emergency practitioners during disaster preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation.