xChange Series Podcast.
Interview with Dr. Elaine Enarson.

Part 2 – Prevention.

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Voiceover: You are listening to a podcast by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. The NSVRC serves as the nation’s principle information and resource center regarding all aspects of sexual violence and its prevention. This podcast is part of the NSVRC xChange series where research and practice converge to end sexual violence.

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Interviewer: In today’s podcast we continue our conversation with Dr. Elaine Enarson about her research regarding sexual and intimate partner violence in the context of disasters. Dr. Enarson is an American disaster sociologist based in Colorado, where she is an international consultant on gender-responsive disaster reduction and offers distance courses on disaster management to American and Canadian students.

What are some key steps that practitioners can take at the local level to help prevent sexual violence in the context of disasters?

Dr. Enarson: There is so much that can be done, and you will not be surprised to hear me say in the same breath so few resources available to do it. (Interviewer: Hmmm.) But I think the first and foremost message that comes through to any of us who talk with service providers after disasters around their work is their desire, their passion to be there to help the women they were working with before. So the most important thing I think that service providers can do, practitioners can do locally, is to just be there. Well, what does that mean? It means that you have to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your program, the ways in which it’s vulnerable to different kinds of hazards, different kinds of disaster events, and the ways in which you can respond, the assets that the organization brings.

So all of that is a – is a process of organizational emergency preparedness and business continuity. And part of that’s just looking at your organization but it’s also situating your organization in space. Because the thing about disasters is they happen in a community, in a particular place. So you may become dependent for a shared electric line, or water supplies, or a toilet, with the office, the building, the family, the house that lives next door to your particular agency. And we don’t always know that – we don’t always work closely with our neighbors, and our networks, or know the mechanics of our buildings, our physical facilities. But this is an extremely important part of organizational planning to be there, again, for the people who depend on our services.

I think the other things that practitioners can and should do, and to some degree are doing - I like to emphasize that there’s a lot of good work going along in this area - are to reach out to local and state and to tribal emergency managers. Sometimes we wait to be invited, right? And it’s just- the time has come and gone for that. We have to be proactive and reach out and let the disaster managers whose job and profession it is to take into account and to build systems of resilience in our communities. Let them know what you can bring to the table and let them know what you will need. So for example a lot of emergency managers don’t know – the law enforcement will know where the shelters for example are - but disaster mangers may not know where the program offices are. They don’t know that you have trained staff skilled in crisis management. They don’t know that you might have an extra facility with stored water, with food, with children’s services, with a network of volunteers, with a strong board that could help with public education. Conversely, they don’t know that the population that you have might depend for their very life on their security in your building. So they don’t see the shelter as a life-saving facility in a crisis, and they need to understand that. They might not understand why it’s so urgent that you have special access, which can be pre-arranged, to get priority in evacuating the people who are sheltered in your program, for example. So there’s that dialogue and we I think sometimes have to really initiate it.

Following from that I think local practitioners can and should offer to train emergency managers in the violence prevention work that they do. And conversely make sure that several people on your staff or in your volunteers or your board members are also trained in emergency management. And in particular, if you’re lucky enough to live in a community that has an community-based emergency preparedness response team, you would want to be a part of that as well. You want to be part of every exercise that disaster managers do in your community, you want to take part in any table-top exercises, and in all the kinds of public awareness campaigns that they do.

Another area that I think is a little neglected that’s just a natural match is for our programs – for service providers - to reach out to the wonderful people who do voluntary and paid disaster mental health recovery work – intervention work. There’s quite a large community of people doing this work. And I find it so discouraging when you look at their websites, or you look at their manuals, you look at how they’re trained, that they don’t take on board in general, gender relations as a factor, any more than they take on ethnicity or social class. They do at look at things like age, sometimes they look at disability issues. But they certainly don’t take on board conflict of any kind or assault or abuse – and they should because it is just as important, and again more life threatening than some of the other issues that they take on board.

Another thing that we need to really look for I think is to work with the people who are running the shelters and for most communities that will be the American Red Cross – although there will be other forms of evacuation, other safe spaces that people look to in a crisis. Most people, of course, don’t go to shelters - they rely on their own family networks and they’ll do what they can to avoid a shelter. The people who rely on shelters, though, are those who need them the most. Low income families, single women with families. People who have really few other places to go. So all the more important that we be there and work with the people who are running those shelters to see if we can’t, for example, ask them to include in their intake forms some information about how safe people feel when they’re coming to this shelter. Are they in fear? Are they in a violent relationship at this time? So there are some key kind of intake questions that can be asked,  I think that should be that are not currently. And it might be feasible in some instances to plan for some safe or protected space in a shelter if it’s a  community that has a very large shelter. We have to do what we can and we’re not able to act until we know what the circumstances of the people coming to us for help are.

I think local practitioners also can engage and can build into the public awareness work that they do - which is so wonderful. Well let’s integrate this notion that in, if you will, the normal disaster of gender-based violence and the big one, are one and the same issue. So let’s integrate this notion of planning ahead, anticipating, learning from the hard-won lessons elsewhere that violence is likely to increase, and to help women and men be safer, feel safer during a disaster and after.

And finally I think another very important thing practitioners can do and I don’t know how successful they might have been already but I think we need to push for this, to ask our funding agencies to build a little bit of money into the budgets to support the work of emergency preparedness. Any dollar spent on mitigation and preparedness has enormous value in the long run in terms of reducing harm to people and reducing material costs to our programs. (Piano music fades in.) So if we can plan ahead and again ask our board, for example, to do some fundraising specifically to raise funds for doing the hard work that it is at first to develop a good emergency preparedness plan for our organization. I think we’d be well-advised to do that.

Voiceover: For more information on the NSVRC please go to www.nsvrc.org or call toll free at 877-739-3895. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center was founded by the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape and is funded in large part by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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