Essay Question: Effective humanitarian and emergency workers ensure that they take into account gender issues. Critically evaluate this statement.
For the promotion of a comprehensive disaster reduction policy, lot of elements and strategic components needs to be taken into consideration and almost all of them must be looked through a gender perspective. As the equal participation of both men and women in formulating policies will lead to optimum utilization of all the talent available, moreover it will also help in identifying varied needs and perceptions of different strata’s of the society which in turn will help in facilitating those policies which will promote more accurate and balanced disaster reduction strategies and programmes (Briceno 2002). In the human rights documents there are explicit equal rights for both men and women which also form the basis of the Humanitarian Charter. All people are entitled to humanitarian assistance, human dignity, there capacity to make choices and then act on those choices (Sphere Handbook, 2011). But disaster and gender relations are socially considered to be on very different platforms, geographically, culturally and economically and both men and women have to undergo complex social consequences due to this, but over the years it has been observed that the gender aspect in disasters has affected women’s lives more than men. In spite of this impact neither any NGO nor the government has considered gender as a factor in vulnerable situations. Women and children have been identified as keys to prevention of a disaster and when seeing disasters from women’s point of view planners are amazed to find critical gaps in their systems and they realise that gender issues are central to the development and growth of humanitarian work and intervention (Enarson, 2000).
According to Victoria J. Barnett, 2003, Humanitarian Intervention is using the Military force to protect the human rights violation victims. Whereas Jerry...