Day: June 18, 2022

Weather disasters that happen more often because of climate change create conditions in which gender-based violence often spikes, according to new research.

The study, published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health, reviewed research from five continents and found increased violence against women and girls in the aftermath of floods, droughts, hurricanes and other extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent as the planet warms. Humanitarian organizations that respond to weather disasters should be aware of this troubling trend when planning their operations, the study authors said.

“When we think of climate change effects, we think of some very drastic and very visual things, things like floods, disruptions of cities, supply chain disruptions — which are all very valid and very real risks of climate change,” said study author Sarah Savic Kallesøe, a public health researcher at Simon Fraser University in Canada. “But there are also some more veiled consequences that are not as easily visible or easily studied. And one of those things is gender-based violence.”

The researchers scoured online databases to find studies on rape, sexual assault, child marriage and other forms of gender-based violence following extreme weather events.

The initial search, based on broad keywords like “violence,” “women,” and “weather,” yielded more than 20,000 results, each of which Savic Kallesøe and her colleagues screened individually to determine whether they were relevant.

Only 41 studies that assessed links between gender-based violence and extreme weather made the cut. The researchers then graded the robustness of each study’s methodology using standard rubrics for grading data quality. Although many of the papers were flawed and a few contradicted each other, most studies — especially the higher quality ones — reported a rise in gender-based violence following extreme weather, Savic Kallesøe said.

For instance, one study found that new moms were more than eight times as likely to be beaten by their romantic partners after Hurricane Katrina if they had suffered storm damage than before the storm hit. Five studies of good or fair quality linked drought in sub-Saharan Africa to upticks in sexual and physical abuse by romantic partners, child marriage, dowry violence, and femicide.

And interviews with survivors revealed that seeking disaster aid can make women more vulnerable: “The shelter is not safe for us. Young men come from seven or eight villages,” said one survivor to researchers following Cyclone Roanu in Bangladesh in 2016. “I feel frightened to stay in the shelters. I stay at my house rather than taking my teenage daughter to the shelters,” she added.

Lindsay Stark, a social epidemiologist at the Brown School of the Washington University in St. Louis, said the pattern “is something that those of us who are working in the humanitarian space know intrinsically, because we see it all the time. So, it is very nice to see this distillation of the evidence.”

Savic Kallesøe emphasized that climate change itself doesn’t directly cause gender-based violence. Instead, she and her colleagues found that gender-based violence is “exacerbated by extreme weather events because it’s a type of coping strategy at the expense of women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities,” she said.

Extreme weather can place people under enormous stress, displace them, force them into crowded relief camps, destroy their livelihoods, and expose them to strangers who might do them harm. Layered over the gender roles that often drive gender-based violence, these risk factors make women especially vulnerable. For instance, a family might marry off a daughter early to have one less mouth to feed after a flood, or a man stressed after a hurricane might snap and strike his wife.

Researchers widely recognize that humanitarian crises, like conflict or forced migration, tend to expose women and girls to violence. That climate disasters would have similar consequences isn’t surprising, said Lori Heise, an expert on gender equity at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

However, the exact ways in which climate disasters lead to gender-based violence still aren’t clear from the data. Few high-quality studies are available — and almost no data has been collected on the challenges faced by LGBTQ people following extreme weather events. The new study highlights the need for more and better research and for humanitarian organizations to engage with women and girls in climate-stressed areas about how best to protect them when disaster strikes, Savic Kallesøe said.

“Gender-based violence is happening all the time, everywhere,” Stark said. “We need to be preventing gender-based violence now … and to understand that if we don’t act now, the situation is going to increase exponentially with the impending climate crisis that we all know is upon us.”

Source: Voice of America

South Africa on Saturday hailed a WTO agreement to allow developing countries to start producing their own COVID vaccines following a near two-year battle.

“We secured an agreement. It was a strongly fought agreement,” said Minister of Trade Ebrahim Patel, who along with India and NGOs had been calling for an intellectual property rights waiver on COVID-related treatments.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) announced a relaxation of intellectual property restrictions on vaccines Wednesday in a move aimed at a providing more equitable access to shots but which many observers criticized for being limited in time and scope.

After months of wrangling, and talks going down to the wire this week to win over some major players in pharmaceutical manufacturing to a compromise, the United States and China finally clinched the deal by agreeing on which countries would benefit from the waiver.

Both South Africa and India had been vocal in their demands for such a move which they said was needed to stop “vaccine apartheid.”

According to the WTO, 60% of the world’s population has received two doses of the COVID vaccine but there are glaring examples of inequity with only 17% having been inoculated in Libya, with the figure at 8% in Nigeria and less than 5% in Cameroon.

In a statement, the South African government saluted a waiver designed to provide local vaccine manufacturers with the right to produce either vaccines or ingredients or elements that are under patents, without the authority of the patent holder, hailing this as a notable step forward — even if limited to five years.

Pretoria added that “to scale up the production on the continent, further partnerships will be needed including access to know-how and technologies.”

The accord for the time being excludes, however, tests and costly therapeutic treatments against COVID on which the WTO is to pronounce in the coming six months.

Commercialization in Africa will be a challenge, however.

Durban-based South African pharma giant Aspen, which clinched a deal last November with U.S.-based Johnson & Johnson to manufacture a “made in Africa for Africa” Aspen-branded COVID vaccine Aspenovax, said last month it could pull the plug owing to lack of orders.

“Our focus now is to ensure we address demand by persuading global procurers for vaccines to source from African producers,” said Patel.

South Africa has three sites under the aegis of Aspen in Durban, Afrigen in Cape Town and Biovac, also in Cape Town, which makes the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Afrigen’s biotech consortium makes the messenger RNA shot based on the Moderna formula, the first to be made based on a broadly used vaccine that does not require the developer’s assistance and approval.

Source: Voice of America

Tunisian judges decided Saturday to extend their national strike for a third week in protest of a decision by President Kais Saied to sack dozens of them, the judges said.

Saied dismissed 57 judges June 1, accusing them of corruption and protecting terrorists — charges that the Tunisian Judges’ Association said were mostly politically motivated.

Judges suspended their work in courts June 4 and said the president’s decisions were designed to control the judiciary and its use against his political opponents.

The judges decided unanimously to extend the strike for a third week … to hold a day of rage in which the judges will protest in the streets in their uniforms,” Mourad Massoudi, the head of the Young Judges Association, told Reuters.

He said members of the judges’ association had decided to stage a hunger strike against the decision to dismiss them. Another judge, Hamadi Rahmani, confirmed the decision.

Saied’s move heightened accusations at home and abroad that he has consolidated one-man rule after assuming executive powers last summer. He subsequently set aside the 2014 constitution to rule by decree and dismissed the elected parliament.

Saied says his moves are needed to cleanse the judiciary of rampant corruption and that he does not aim to control the judiciary.

Source: Voice of America