Beyond the obvious problem of a single bucket for 1,000 people, the lack of sex segregation essentially locks women out of the shelters. ‘It’s embedded in Bangladeshi culture that women cannot mix with men and boys outside of their family males,’ explains Fordham, for fear of bringing shame on the family. Any woman mixing with those males ‘is just fair game for any kind of sexual harassment and worse. So the women won’t go to the shelters.’ The result is that women die at much higher rates (following the 1991 cyclone and flood the death rate was almost five times as high for women as for men40) simply for want of sex-segregated provision.
On the subject of the violence women face in disaster contexts, we know that violence against women increases in the ‘chaos and social breakdown that accompany natural disaster’ – but, in part because of that self-same chaos and social breakdown, we don’t know by exactly how much. During Hurricane Katrina local rape crisis centres had to close, meaning that in the days that followed no one was counting or confirming the number of women who had been raped.41 Domestic-violence shelters also had to close, with the same result. Meanwhile, as in Bangladesh, women were experiencing sexual violence in gender-neutral storm shelters. Thousands of people who had been unable to evacuate New Orleans before Katrina hit were temporarily housed in Louisiana’s Superdome. It didn’t take long for lurid stories of violence, of rapes and beatings, to start circulating. There were reports of women being battered by their partners.42
‘You could hear people screaming and hollering for people to help them, “Please don’t do this to me, please somebody help me”’, one woman recalled in an interview with IWPR.43 ‘They said things didn’t happen at the Superdome. They happened. They happened. People were getting raped. You could hear people, women, screaming. Because there’s no lights, so it’s dark, you know.’ She added, ‘I guess they was just grabbing people, doing whatever they wanted to do.’ Precise data on what happened to whom in Hurricane Katrina has never been collated.
For women who try to escape from war and disaster, the gender-neutral nightmare often continues in the refugee camps of the world. ‘We have learned from so many mistakes in the past that women are at a greater risk for sexual assault and violence if they don’t have separate bathrooms,’ says Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia.44 In fact international guidelines state that toilets in refugee camps should be sex-segregated, marked and lockable.45 But these requirements are often not enforced.
A 2017 study by Muslim Women’s charity Global One found that 98% of female refugees in Lebanon did not have access to separate latrines.46 Research by the Women’s Refugee Commission has found that women and girls in accommodation centres in Germany and Sweden are vulnerable to rape, assault and other violence because of a failure to provide separate latrines, shower facilities or sleeping quarters. Mixed living and sleeping quarters can mean women develop skin rashes from having to keep their hijab on for weeks.
Female refugees regularly47 complain that the remote location48 of many toilets is worsened by a lack of adequate lighting both on the routes to the latrines and in the facilities themselves. Large areas of the infamous Idomeni camp in Greece were described as ‘pitch-black’ at night. And although two studies have found that installing solar lighting or handing out individual solar lights to women in camps has had a dramatic impact on their sense of safety, it’s a solution that has not been widely adopted.49
So most women find their own solutions. A year after the 2004 tsunami women and girls in Indian displacement camps were still walking in pairs to and from the community toilet and bathing facilities to ward off harassment from men.50 A group of Yezidi women who ended up in Nea Kavala camp in northern Greece after fleeing sexual slavery under ISIS formed protection circles so they could accompany each other to the toilet. Others (69% in one 2016 study51), including pregnant women who need frequent toilet trips, simply don’t go at night. Some women in reception centres in Germany have resorted to not eating and drinking, a solution also reported by female refugees in Idomeni, at the time Greece’s largest informal refugee camp.52 According to a 2018 Guardian report, some women have taken to wearing adult nappies.53
Some of the failure to protect women from male violence in European camps can be put down to the speed with which authorities in, for example, Germany and Sweden (who to their credit have taken far more refugees than most), have had to respond to the crisis.54 But this is not the whole story, because women in detention centres around the world experience the same problems with male guards. Women at a US immigration facility in 2005 reported that guards used a camera phone to take pictures of them while they were sleeping, as well as when they came out of the showers and bathrooms.55 In 2008, a seventeen-year-old Somali refugee detained at a Kenyan police station was raped by two policemen when she left her cell to use the toilet.56 Yarl’s Wood Detention centre in the UK has been dogged for years by multiple cases of sexual abuse and assault.57
Given the steady stream of abuse reports from around the world, perhaps it’s time to recognise that the assumption that male staff can work in female facilities as they do in male facilities is another example of where gender neutrality turns into gender discrimination. Perhaps sex-segregation needs to extend beyond sanitation facilities, and perhaps no male staff should be in positions of power over vulnerable women. Perhaps. But if this is going to happen, authorities would first have to countenance the idea that male officials might be exploiting
