Does Displacement Discriminate? Recognizing the Nexus of Gender and Displacement

When disaster hits and we are faced with a situation where a large number of people are impacted by and are collectively suffering and trying to survive it, we witness a tendency to say that such large scale violence does not discriminate. It affects everyone, implying it affects everyone equally and similarly. However, we know that to not be true of any experience, even within circumstances that could be considered those of peace. We understand through all the research that has gone into parsing power structures to unravel the discrepancies in how the same phenomenon is lived by different people in vastly different ways based on aspects of the spaces they occupy in structures of power based on their race, ethnicity, gender, ability, religious alignments, socioeconomic, and geographical positioning, among others.

A lot of these intersections remain underresearched. UNHCR’s Joint Data Center’s Quarterly Digest on Forced Displacement reports (2021) emphasizes the need “to improve the data collection of data to investigate the intersectionality of gender and displacement” (Klugman, 2021, p. 3). Existing research highlights the gendered nature of livelihood, poverty, intimate partner violence, child marriage, and gender norms determine the differential nature of inequalities and violence emanating for people who have been rendered displaced.

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Reviewing some of the work in the context of Pakistan and similar contexts elsewhere that has analysed some of the manifestations of gender for displaced communities, we can acknowledge the need for more in this direction for holistically addressing displacement. This review is not exhaustive and only serves as a call for action considering the ground realities that exemplify the need for more work at the intersections of gender and displacement.

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One extension of the gendered discrepancies in times of displacement that has been identified and extensively researched is how poverty exists in gendered ways and continues to determine the disproportionate continued marginalization of subsections of displaced communities. For example, through a multi-country analysis of “multidimensional poverty in contexts of forced displacement”, UNHCR shares that while generally “displaced households are generally poorer than nondisplaced households”, “women are more likely to lead a multidimensionally poor household than men” (Klugman, 2021). Often people are forced to enter the labor force as adolescents and children, and this has implications for school dropout rates, increased insecurities such as food insecurity, increased incidences of sexual and gender based violence, among others.

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A key example of the gendering of the impacts failing structures can be witnessed in the “super floods” in Pakistan. Displacing “more than 33 million people” (Mansoor, 2022) and putting “more than eight million women and girls of reproductive age” at increased risk, in particular being burdened with “significant challenges in managing menstruation, such as lack of access to sanitary materials, including underwear; lack of access to private/safe toilets and disposal options for used sanitary materials; and lack of soap, water, private bathing facilities, and places to dry reusable sanitary materials” (Sadique et. al., 2023). A lack of focus on this dimension during this particular time led to two college students founding “Mahwari Justice, a grassroots movement to distribute menstrual products to women in need” (Mansoor, 2022), delivering “20,000 menstrual kits to those in need”. Because of their work and that of others, more attention during this time was brought to menstrual justice, even including calls for “removing the luxury tax on menstrual products”, and provision of more information on how menstruating people could have more access to accessible and hygienic modes of managing menstruation.

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Displacement also has consequences for patterns of marriage specifically those that are forced on the girl child and on women. On the one hand, these patterns need to be contextually established and understood more for making reliable claims about how they emerge in Pakistan, there is literature that shares how “displaced parents may seek marriage of young daughters to alleviate financial constraints, or earlier marriage of young women might be a way to quickly assimilate with local populations” (Lu, et. al., 2021). The increase in marriages is not the only dynamic that emerges from displacement though; there could be both an “upward” or even a “downward pressure on the age of marriage of women”, considering that “displacement may increase the search cost of finding good matches,” “displaced families may not want their daughters to marry if they are productive household members in home production or the labor market,” or the “asymmetries” in how many men and women have survived the displacement. These patterns when delved into further, illustrate how much incidences of sexual and gender based violence, including but not limited to intimate partner violence also increases in communities that have been displaced.

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One strand of gender inequalities in addressing issues of displacement often missing or disregarded across the world including in Pakistan is that of the displacement experienced by queer and transgender people. It has been recorded in multiple contexts how “transgender people have reduced educational opportunities leading to high levels of unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and health risks” (Munir, 2019, p. 50). While gender nonbinary ways of being have been a part of the social fabric for a long time, more recent times have brought a surge in queerphobic rhetoric and campaigns targetting the transgender or the khwaja sira community in Pakistan. This has also added to the under researched area of displacement that queer communities are already more vulnerable to, even in times that are generally considered those of peace by those not being specifically targetted for their gender identity and expression. One dimension of this persecution in the context of Pakistan for example is “the role of police as agents of persecution” (p. 51), exacerbated by the “near perpetual housing instability” (p. 55) that people of diverse Sexual Orientations and Gender Identities and Expressions (SOGIES) experience. This is an aspect of gendered analysis that has been extremely underresearched considering the dominant religious sensitivities that make it harder even to collect data from queer communities, where aspects of queer identities and expressions are criminalized and stigmatized, and any question added to a survey instrument gathering data from displaced communities on gender needs to consider these dominant sensitivities. This is both a challenge for research but also a recognition of the need for more data and call for more thought to be added to research related to gender in this context that is mindful of the nuances of such stigmatization and can amlify voices from within gender diverse communities without exposing people to further risk.