WASHINGTON — A new effort to protect women from rape and help them deliver babies in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines remains troubled and inadequate, the United Nations and international aid groups said this week.
The effort, loosely coordinated among more than a dozen developed countries, aid groups and the United Nations, is aimed at assisting 65,000 women deemed at risk of sexual assault and an estimated 1,000 women giving birth a day in regions ravaged by the typhoon in November.
“We’re on a big learning curve,” said Justine Greening, Britain’s international development secretary. “What we’re trying to do is make sure that going forward we put the real focus on women and girls and keeping them safe in a way that hasn’t happened in the past enough.”
Ms. Greening was the convener of a conference in London last month — by coincidence held just days after the typhoon churned over the Philippines — when 13 governments, including the United States, agreed to assume that women and girls are in greater danger of violence after natural disasters than men and boys, and that organizations should act quickly to prevent and treat it rather than waiting for confirmation that it has occurred.
But the money for the effort in the Philippines is flowing slowly. The United Nations Population Fund has asked its donor nations and agencies to contribute $30 million to give Filipino women hundreds of thousands of kits with hygiene supplies, hire staff at 80 temporary maternal wards and counsel victims of rape. So far, it has commitments for only about $3 million.
“I was a bit disappointed about the lukewarm response from donors,” said Ugochi Daniels, a top humanitarian aid coordinator for the United Nations.
Still, Ms. Daniels said the $3 million commitment — from Britain, Australia and the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund — marked a record. “I don’t think we’ve ever gotten more than $300,000,” she said.
The hygiene supplies do not include condoms, typically part of such kits, for fear of angering local communities. Nor are relief workers supplied with emergency contraception like the morning-after pill, which is illegal in the Philippines.
Sexual health “has always been tricky when it comes to emergency situations,” said Nora Murat, the director for the International Planned Parenthood Federation in the region that includes the Philippines.
But advocates are applauding what they say is improved coordination among the contributing organizations and the speedy arrival in the Philippines of specialists to make sure that evacuation centers have better lighting, “safe spaces” where women can congregate separately and gender-segregated bathrooms with locks on the doors.
“I think there’s the political will to do a better job, and I think the Philippines is giving us an immediate opportunity to test that will,” Ms. Greening said.
The United States has not pledged any money to the population fund’s effort, but Nancy Lindborg, the assistant administrator for democracy, conflict and humanitarian assistance at the United States Agency for International Development, said the agency insisted that programs that are part of its $30 million in disaster aid to the Philippines show that they are incorporating measures to protect women.
Some experts expressed skepticism about the agency’s approach, however. “When you talk about integrated protection, accountability to women and girls goes out the window,” said Heidi Lehmann, the director of the Women’s Protection and Empowerment unit of the International Rescue Committee. “That requires specialized, specific gender-based violence programming.” It is not realistic, she said, “to think that you can add a bullet point to the shelter guy’s job description.”
After the conflict in Bosnia in the early 1990s, in which an estimated 60,000 women were raped, the Inter-agency Working Group on Reproductive Health in Crises said that women in war zones or disaster areas should be provided with birth kits, contraception, obstetrics care and counseling. Yet over the past two decades, that help has been delivered sporadically, if at all.
Women who barter sex for food and water remain a major concern, officials said. To combat the rise in trafficking that has occurred in past disasters in the Philippines, the American agency has increased its funding to programs that warn families about the dangers. The goal, Ms. Lindborg said, is “so they’re not taken in by that great job offer in Manila that your 16-year-old daughter is being recruited for.” Even before the typhoon, an estimated 375,000 women and girls in the area — about 10 percent of women of childbearing age affected by the storm — would have likely experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes, United Nations officials said. Based on studies of emergencies, they said that Haiyan’s aftermath could add another 65,000 victims of sexual assault.
In Tacloban, the hardest-hit major city, the city administrator, Tecson Lim, said last week that the police had been unable to confirm rumors of rapes and sexual assaults in the days and weeks following the typhoon.
A drastic decrease in Tacloban’s population after the storm has helped reduce the risk of sexual violence in the city, Mr. Lim said at a news conference. He said at least half the population left after the storm and had not returned, and those who left were mainly those categorized by the city as vulnerable: women, children, older people and anyone with an illness or disability. Pedestrians are now overwhelmingly men in Tacloban City.
But relief officials working near Tacloban dismissed the idea that the threat to women had dissipated. Ms. Daniels of the United Nations Population Fund said that of the 1,300 police officers deployed there, only two were women.
At the news conference, Mr. Lim promised to search for ways to make it easier for women to report sex crimes.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/11/world/asia/effort-to-help-filipino-women-falters-un-says.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print
