Building disaster resilience with young girls
The primary-school girl is again ‘hidden in plain sight’ in girl-focused disaster reduction and empowerment projects, which, where they exist at all, implicitly exclude her in programmes that in practice best serve her elder sister.69 But promising practices exist. The Girls In Risk Reduction Leadership (G.I.R.R.L.) Project based in South Africa profiled in this chapter offers younger girls as well as their teenaged sisters precious opportunities for self and skill-development by partnering with disaster management and development agencies.70 Even the youngest girl has something to contribute. Like their brothers and elder sisters, girls have specific environmental and cultural knowledge based on the age and gender-specific division of labour of their time and place. They may help with community-led risk assessments, explaining in their own ways and words the hazards girls know of in their neighbourhoods and their ideas for adapting to or reducing these. Many
very young girls already take part in sandbagging, tree planting, rainwater harvesting, and a host of other mitigation projects. Girls’ feedback is needed about school safety plans also, which generally assume that girls and boys in primary grades live in essentially identical social worlds. But do they? How prepared are young girls and boys, respectively, to respond to immediate threats to their life and safety, whether at home or school? How can the youngest of girls as well as boys best be supported? The curiosity and creativity of the young girl is a vital platform for community education to reduce risk.71 Disaster education is a two-way street, as amply demonstrated in the UNISDR 2012 campaign on girls and women as ‘invisible forces of resilience’ and in the practical examples of risk reduction education around the globe compiled in Let Our Children Teach Us.72 Girls can and do share what they have learned about disaster risk management through girl-to-girl networks using age-appropriate and culturally competent ways of communicating which we know too little about. Disaster educators can and should partner with the youngest girls and their advocates, striving to build on gender-responsive ways of teaching and learning, and minimise in disaster education the gender stereotyping so rampant in children’s worlds and so very limiting. Not every girl aspires to be a ‘master of disaster’, to name one popular model for disaster education. tiM a hetheRinGton
to trafficking and other forms of gender violence that escalate when protective networks are frayed and poverty deepens. Displaced adult women are increasingly, though not sufficiently, among those consulted about the location of latrines and lighting, hygiene needs, and the design of safe spaces for women – but are girls? How can we know how ‘girl friendly’ our child-friendly spaces are without asking? More present than ever before in primary grades, girls’ school-leaving rates remain stubbornly higher than boys’, and disasters exacerbate the challenge.67 Girls can be difficult to reach due to extreme poverty or extreme sex segregation norms, but genderresponsive emergency education can help even the youngest girls and boys imagine a wider future. What texts should be taught – and what is the subtext of the lessons we teach girls in the aftermath of disasters? Whose authority is reinforced and whose knowledge validated? We must respect the friendships younger girls form and how they communicate, as well as how they negotiate relationships with older girls and boys, often despite the binary gender norms imposed in schools.68 Avoiding play and school activities in emergency education programmes that reproduce gender inequalities is surely part of ‘building back better’.
Count girls – make girls count
Without examining separately the distinct life stages of child and youth development, even our best efforts will sidestep the girl child. By leaving girls out, we further exacerbate their vulnerabilities and miss a critical moment of influence as young girls become the young women who will be such critical actors as we strive to adjust to the challenges of our more hazardous planet. Children at every stage of life have something to bring to disaster risk reduction and something to lose by being excluded. Count girls in. elaine enarson is an independent scholar from Colorado. 105