Gender in Disaster MitigationRIDHA MARISSA EL SEIRA

DR. EUIS KURNIATI , M.PD

Background

Indonesia is one of the country that is prone to disaster. The total of 2,190 disaster occurred from 1 January 2019 to 30 Sept 2019 (BNPB, 2019).

Victims of the greatest disasters consist of children, women, and old man belonging to vulnerable groups (Lopez, Hayden, Cologon, & Hadley, 2012; Pillai, R & Sekar, 2013; Alston et al., 2019)

MethodUsing a feminist lense, this paper would seek to explore what extent the disaster mitigation has been adopting gender responsive principle. Using a literature review, this paper also aims to see whether or not the existing mitigation approach has in fact potentially harmed one gender. Finding of this paper is expected to offer recommendation to policy makers and educators on how to develop a gender responsive and also gender equity mitigation approach.

Result and Discussion

Many countries are trying to formulate gender responsive in disaster mitigation plans. Many

countries have a gender perspective in development

programs and policies and are still inadequate to this day.

What is surprising

Many are too focused on the vulnerability of

women and girls rather than marginal groups as

active agents and women and girls as agents of change in disaster mitigation.

Disasters that have an adaptive concept in them

shows the treatment of power that holds the core of

vulnerability that cannot be adequately handled.

Such an age, education, belief, social, cultural,

economic, legal and policy factors that limit the role of

women and children in disaster. (Young et al., 2017;

Cvetkovi et al., 2018; Hemachandra et al., 2018;

Siahaan & Tambunan, 2017; Reyes & Lu, 2015; Enarson &

Chakrabarti, 2009; Lee & Fraser, 2019; Pathak & Emah, 2017; Akhter , 2015; Hasan et

al., 2019)

But with the global urgency shifting to multidisciplinary studies, negotiation, agency, and equality has a movement towards new direction.

Disasters are not seen as they can reducedisaster risk by being prepared but byencouraging relationships between people,communities and places

The government needs to pay attention to the relationship between policy stability and policy implementation over time. This is because there are significant differences between the way women and men deal with disasters from both partisipation and needs in disaster management (Hasan et al., 2019; Rao, 2019; Fayazi, Yeh, & Li, 2019).

ConclusionGender in disaster mitigation is very important to understand because there are differences in ways of thinking, experiencing, and adapting to disaster in disaster

mitigation. It is seen how access and power are found in inhibiting disaster mitigation, so a good approach is an approach that understands disasters and how they deal with

responsibilities that are negotiated under highly unequal power relations

Thank You!