xChange Series Podcast. Interview with Dr. Elaine Enarson. Part 1 – Research Base. (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 talk 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. Dr. Enarson was lead course developer of a FEMA course on social vulnerability, and initiated and directed a grassroots risk assessment project with women in the Caribbean as well as the online Gender and Disaster Sourcebook project.  She also taught full-time at Brandon University in the Applied Disaster and Emergency Studies department. Co-editor of three readers on gender and disaster, she recently released Women Confronting Disaster: From Vulnerability to Resilience. Dr. Enarson received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Oregon in 1981. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your expertise and insights with us. Dr. Enarson: Thank you so much for having me. It’s wonderful to be here. Interviewer: We know that there are often challenges in researching the prevalence of sexual and intimate partner violence, and it's easy to imagine that the chaotic nature of disasters would make that even more difficult. Based on what we do know, what are some of the key lessons that have been learned about the links between disasters and sexual violence? Dr. Enarson: Yes, well, thank you for that excellent question. Let me begin on the negative. I think one of the things that we’ve learned, and it won’t be any surprise to those of you listening to this, is that gender-based violence will not be seen; it will not be heard. People really don’t want to go there in a disaster context. So in the same way that violence is typically minimized and denied in society at large – disasters simply again kind of make more visible the fracture lines of our society so they’re even more minimized, even more denied in a disaster. But this is partly the status quo around gender-based violence but it also arises from this peculiar climate of disaster research that wants to focus not so much on the mythology of disaster - in which people act in crazy ways, they go off half-cocked, they panic, they loot, they hurt each other – want to fight against those, which are proven in the most part to be myths of disaster behavior. (Interviewer: Hmmm.) Focus instead on the positive, the positive coping skills. So it’s a difficult line to walk, isn’t it? Because of course people are complex and human relationships are very fraught at the best of times and particularly in crises like this, so we see both. But there’s I think a willful looking away from what happens that’s a negative, and particularly gender-based violence. So I think that’s one of the lessons that we’ve learned. Another negative that we’ve learned is that at least with respect to domestic violence and sexual assault we find that an increase is likely. It’s not always the case that disasters will lead to this conclusion. And I say that because we simply don’t know. It’s not a question that’s asked. My hunch, frankly, is that we would find higher levels of gender-based violence when a disaster destroys housing in large proportions. And that’s of course for the obvious reasons that women have to sometimes move back into the homes of their abusers. These moments become windows of opportunity for sexual assault often, for locals but also for people who come into a community and who are unknown and when the systems that protect women and girls and boys ordinarily are rent asunder – when those protective systems are no longer there – we see of course an opportunity for assault that increases. So those are kind of the housing issues when people are not living with the people they’re accustomed to living with, when they’re on the move, when they’re in and out of different unknown environments, when they’re displaced into shelters that don’t have support systems for them, don’t have good safety systems in place. But it would be interesting to see and I think we need to really understand what would happen in the event of a major toxic release event where people are asked to shelter in place (Interviewer: Hmmm.) or a pandemic where people are asked to shelter - we don’t know and knock wood we won’t have that opportunity to study. And on research I think the other thing we’ve learned is what we don’t know. We again, I’ll say this over and over again, we really have a huge knowledge gap in this country, and it really it’s an international gap as well, but we don’t know at all enough about what happens to sexual minorities, with respect to violence in these crises. We don’t know what happens on male-on male violence of different kinds, interpersonal violence. We don’t know what happens to the people who drift in and out of our communities - transient populations - whether they’re tourists or whether they’re migrant workers. We don’t know what happens with non-English speaking people, or rural women and men, who would be out of our reporting systems altogether. And we certainly don’t know enough at all what about happens in terms gender-based violence against the children of our families, children of disasters. (Piano music fades in.) So this is again another extremely important area, along with looking at what happens to women and men with disabilities and gender-based violence. There’s a big challenge for the research community here. 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.)