xChange Series Podcast. Interview with Dr. Elaine Enarson. Part 4 – Future Directions. (Piano music starts, then fades to background.) 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. (Music fades out.) 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 do you see as some of the next steps, nationally and internationally, in preventing sexual violence in disasters? Dr. Enarson: I like to dream big. I think we have to at least envision what we would like in order to begin to take steps to get there. So I would like to see a national initiative to end sexual violence in disasters. I’d like to see the White House Council on Women and Girls, for example, step up. I’d like to see real leadership from the White House. I’d like to see real leadership from FEMA within the Department of Homeland Security. And FEMA has really transformed itself recently, I’m happy to say, with the new administration we have new leaders; we’re beginning to take it seriously. And currently the approach is on the, quote, unquote, “whole community.” Grassroots work is seen as very important. Diversity is seen as very important. So the ground is fertile for this kind of work. But we need to make this a national initiative with long arms, long tentacles into all of our communities, looking at the tribal communities as much as our state and local communities. I think also in parallel with that we need a well-funded and sustained, I would say at least a five year research collaborative that would bring together scholars, practitioners, local activists to ask the right questions. What are those? Well, I’ve suggested a number in my conversation with you this morning, but others would have other ideas to bring to the table. Let’s bring the best minds together, figure out what we absolutely need to know to have evidence-based planning, public policy work in this area. Building on the excellent work that’s already been done around violence against women in this country by the research community, by the policy community. But again, this is a gap to date. The disaster management world has many, many opportunities for doing research but very few of them target this as an issue. I think we need to step outside of existing systems and again have a national conversation, a national initiative led, I’d say again, by the White House and a research collaborative. And building then on that is a really a sustained public awareness campaign that builds on the strengths that we have, that we have fought so hard for in this country and certainly in the anti-violence movement. And taking advantage of the new momentum, really - the new social justice approach to reducing the risk of disasters, to identifying the hazards. How do we produce these? How do we increase risk by the very nature of our planning and how we live and the way we organize our communities, how we use energy? How is it that the nation is increasing rather than decreasing our risk of disaster? How is it that the nation tolerates these extraordinarily high levels of sexual violence decade after decade after decade? Lots of challenges here. But building on the successes that we have achieved in both realms, both disaster risk reduction and the mitigation or prevention or at least certainly the response to sexual violence - there’s an opportunity to really reach out to the public and say, “This is a fixable problem.” Again I would highlight in this campaign the experiences of women and men and boys and girls who have lived through disaster-based sexual violence and can speak directly to other survivors and to people who are at increased risk and may not know it. May not know about the resources that are available for them. May not understand where to go for help. There’s an enormous job of raising awareness in both of these areas. I think the time is now. I’m really quite encouraged that this is one of the issues when I’m fairly frequently asked to speak about the connections between disaster and gender relations generally. I’m quite encouraged that this is the area that people seem to really get when they say, “What, disasters, women, gender, what are you talking about?” This is the area that makes the most sense to them; they understand this. So there’s, as I’ve said, fertile ground, there’s a kind of a national conversation beginning here. The time is now to begin to act. And that the United States has also willing and eager partners in the international community. The international women’s community in particular - wonderful array of resources on dealing with, coping with, responding to, reporting gender-based violence in disasters. It behooves us to take advantage of those, not to dismiss them as something that works in Haiti but could never work in New York. It’s simply not the case. (Piano music fades in.) There are lots of ideas that we could beg, borrow, or steal from the international community and put to use to help build safer, and more just, and more resilient, and less violent communities in the United States. And I hope that that’s where we’re headed. 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. (Music fades up and ends with a horn flourish.)