Catastrophe in Japan and an uncertain future for women

TRIGGER WARNING: This post includes facts about sexual violence in war and disaster.

A woman warms herself at an evacation center in Ofuna, Japan/Associated Press

First came the 9.0 earthquake, the fourth largest ever recorded. Next, a massive wall of water that swallowed houses, people, trucks, boats and trains. Then a tidal wave of bodies washed onto the shore.

Finally, a looming nuclear catastrophe that could be the worst, experts say, since Chernobyl.

The unfolding nuclear situation in Japan had surpassed Three Mile Island by Monday night, U.S. time, according to one expert. By the time this article is published, we may know whether there has been a massive nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, or not. Either way, experts say the radiation could last for months.

Perhaps it is too early to anticipate anything beyond the immediate horror faced by the people – all people – in Japan. But I’m already worried, in particular, about the survival and safety of women in the months and years to come.

As the recent disaster in Haiti taught us, the struggle for women in disaster zones continues for months after the last survivor is pulled from the wreckage. Then, too, we could hardly comprehend the damage, as an estimated 316,000 people died amid the rubble.

A year after the earthquake in Haiti, about a million people still lived in camps terrorized by rapists. The aftershocks of disaster are often fueled by the existing realities of patriarchy and gender-based violence. And, as we saw amid the tent camps of Port-au-Prince and the FEMA trailers used after Hurricane Katrina, poverty affects the ability of disaster victims to find safe shelter.

“The way you saw the earth shake, that’s how our bodies are shaking now,” an anti-violence activist in Haiti said of women, long after the ground stopped moving.

Haiti reminded us that disasters affect women in specific ways.

As the World Health Organization notes, women and children account for more than 75 percent of people displaced by disasters. For those women, disaster magnifies health care disparities and the burdens assigned by gender roles:

In addition to the general effects of natural disaster and lack of health care, women are vulnerable to reproductive and sexual health problems, and increased rates of sexual and domestic violence. Moreover, gender roles dictate that women become the primary caretakers for those affected by disasters – including children, the injured and sick, and the elderly – substantially increasing their emotional and material work load. – World Health Organization

Women and their children were doubtless prominently featured among the many thousands evacuated from neighborhoods near the nuclear plant. While research has apparently shown that women are able to absorb more radiation than men without immediate effects, women’s reproductive and overall health will doubtless be affected. Then, there are the countless people – men, women and children – made homeless by the earthquake and tsunami.

As caretakers, women may spearhead the family’s search for shelter and safety. Away from home, the women displaced in Japan could face increased vulnerability to sexual assault. Even for those with adequate shelter, research has shown that domestic violence increases in times of communal distress, from the BP oil spill to the economic crisis.

Then, there is nuclear disaster that, by Sunday, may already have exposed people to radiation as far as 60 miles from the Fukushima plant. That raises concerns about the potential for miscarriages and other negative effects of radiation on women’s reproductive health, although the extent of the damage is largely unknown right now.

Perhaps the only remotely positive note is that the situation has raised questions about the advisability of building nuclear plants, particularly in areas often subject to massive earthquakes.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the disaster was the country’s worst since World War II.

Let’s let that reality sink in for a moment by remembering World War II and its impact on women.

War is a manmade disaster that affects women in particularly terrible ways. When the United States decided to drop atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, women were disproportionately affected, according to one book:

Casualties in both cities were more prevalent among women than men, largely because of the conscription of males for the war effort, which left more female than male civilians present at the time of the attacks. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had strategic value to the Japanese war effort, but each also had a large noncombatant population. In selecting cities as the targets, U.S. officials ensured that there would be a substantial number of female casualties. – Women and War: a historical encyclopedia from antiquity to the present

Then, from Iraq to Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo, there is the horrible reality, past and present, of rape as a weapon of war.

Let’s not forget the so-called “comfort women” enslaved by the Japanese military during World War II, or allegations about the rape of Japanese women by U.S. soldiers, or the Rape of Nanking, during which as many as 80,000 Chinese women and girls were gang-raped by Japanese soldiers. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of people, many of them women, who were killed by the acute effects of the bombs.

In short, the war was particularly disastrous for women. Its impact reverberated long after the bombs were dropped, long after the earth stopped shaking.

If the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters are the biggest catastrophe for Japan since the war, then we have reason to be concerned for the future of women in the affected areas. For the moment, and from the outside, the scale of the disaster has yet to sink in. We can only hope that all the parties involved in the disaster response – from aid groups to foreign militaries to friends and neighbors – will make women’s health and safety a priority.

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