The Resilience Divide Part 2: Disaster Impact on the LGBTIQ Community
Maria Sjödin gives insight into how disasters disproportionately impact the LGBTIQ population
When disaster strikes, social inequalities are magnified. Poverty, discrimination, and other underlying circumstances drastically affect the way individuals experience disaster events — a particularly prevalent reality for individuals in the LGBTIQ community.
Last month, One Concern hosted Maria Sjödin, Deputy Executive Director at OutRight Action International, to discuss how disasters disproportionately impact the LGBTIQ population. In our second installment of our Resilience Divide series, we highlight some of OutRight’s recent research, Maria’s expertise in advocating for LGBTIQ rights across the globe, and the ways in which we can begin to address — and ultimately close — the Resilience Divide for the LGBTIQ community.
About OutRight Action International
OutRight Action International is an organization that works to research, document, defend and advance human rights for LGBTIQ people across the world, operating at the international, national and regional levels. OutRight is the only LGBTIQ organization with a permanent advocate presence at the United Nations, where they hold special consultative status.
As an international organization, the OutRight team works hard to collaborate with existing movements at the local level. Maria began our session highlighting OutRight’s efforts to partner with grassroots organizations and communities already engaged in activist work. “You can’t just parachute rights into another country and think that you can change things from the outside,” she noted. “You have to work with organizations who are in the country, so that change can come from the inside.”
Collaborating with grassroots movements helps OutRight identify the specific inequalities that LGBTIQ populations face in their communities. And as Maria pointed out, this focus on individual experience is also key to understanding the ways in which populations experience the impacts of disasters.
“Not everyone is affected equally,” she explained, and to address these gaps, we have to take into account the larger social factors that determine an individual’s risk of impact before, during and after a disaster.
How Disasters Disproportionately Affect LGBTIQ Populations
OutRight’s most recent research focuses on the effects of the current COVID-19 pandemic on LGBTIQ populations. In March and April, they conducted interviews in 38 countries to understand the impact of the pandemic, and as an extension, how lockdown and isolation are disproportionately affecting the LGBTIQ community.
The following findings from their COVID-19 report, “Vulnerability Amplified,” describe seven key struggles faced by the LGBTIQ population during the coronavirus pandemic:
1. Devastation of livelihoods and food insecurity;
2. Disruptions in healthcare and medication access and reluctance to seek care;
3. Elevated risk of family or domestic violence;
4. Increased isolation and anxiety;
5. Concerns about elevated societal stigma, discrimination, violence and scapegoating;
6. Instances of abuse of state power;
7. Anxiety about organizational survival and need for community support and unity.
Some of these issues can be generalized to the broader population, as situations such as food insecurity and isolation are experienced by individuals across the world, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation.
But for members of the LGBTIQ community, many of these hardships are in addition to or a result of other inequalities that they already experience in everyday life. For COVID-19 specifically, for example, Maria noted that loss of livelihoods disproportionately affects those who work in the informal economy, which is a large proportion of the LGBTIQ community.
Notably, many of the issues impacting the LGBTIQ population described above are not limited to the specific circumstances of COVID-19. “For marginalized and vulnerable communities that are vulnerable before a disaster, their circumstances are going to be exacerbated,” Maria explained.
For many LGBTIQ individuals, access to emergency relief, mass shelters and other forms of support during a disaster are complicated — or entirely inaccessible — as a result of discrimination. Hear Maria describe this point in further detail in the clip below:
The Importance of Intersectionality in Activist Work
“For us, you can’t separate different movements.”
Maria noted that the intersection of Pride month and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement this year demonstrated an important piece of LGBTIQ history: the first Pride was a riot against police brutality.
To Maria, and for many other activists around the world, fighting for equality means fighting for the rights of all peoples. This includes fighting for equality in all realms — and disasters are no exception. During the COVID-19 pandemic, OutRight’s research has demonstrated that LGBTIQ populations are particularly vulnerable. But as Maria also highlighted, in the US, people of color, particularly, Black Americans, are dying at much higher rates than whites.
In analyzing the disparities of disaster impacts across the world, Maria emphasized the importance of looking at risk holistically — across all potential experiences of inequality. For OutRight, this means being intersectional at both the strategic and concrete level. Maria speaks more about the importance of intersectionality in the clip below:
The Path Forward: Data, Awareness, and Action
Not unlike modeling the impacts of disasters, having data is key to understanding, addressing, and ultimately solving the problem at hand. Building inclusive datasets and using data to effect change are two of the ways in which Maria sees data being a driving force in the movement for LGBTIQ equality.
For One Concern, this issue is particularly relevant. We get our population data from the US census, which currently does not ask questions regarding gender identity or sexual orientation. With this data, we would be able to incorporate the LGBTIQ population into our impact analyses, shedding light on the community’s direct impact during disaster events.
Data, as Maria pointed out, can have a large impact on advancing these issues at a higher level. The OutRight team will be using their research on the pandemic for years to come in an effort to convince government and humanitarian organizations that they need to be better prepared to handle disaster relief efforts. “You need to know how to act, and — if you can — ensure that your relief is going to be accessible to everyone through the mechanisms that you have. You have to look to other mechanisms, specifically to reach more marginalized communities.”
On the personal level, Maria stressed the importance of staying informed and showing up. Voicing solidarity with the LGBTIQ community and staying educated on the ways in which individuals experience disasters differently are both essential to the efforts of advancing the rights of LGBTIQ people worldwide.
This sentiment does not have to stop at the individual level. Corporations also have a role to play in the fight for equality. Beyond supporting employees and expressing their stance on social issues, companies have the influence to drive concrete changes in society at large. Maria pointed out the group of US corporations who made a major impact on state laws by voicing their disapproval of discriminatory legislation.
Above all, Maria emphasized that showing up is a year-round practice. “For LGBTIQ individuals, Pride month is just a burst, and then you have eleven other months where you have to have the strength and commitment to be out. And that goes for our allies, too.”
By shedding light on disparities in disaster impacts for the LGBTIQ community, we hope to bring awareness to an issue often overlooked in disaster research. Building resilience, for our communities and for the world, can only be done if we are building resilience for all members of society.
Interested in getting involved with OutRight Action International? Sign up for their newsletter, or support their COVID-19 Emergency Fund, which helps those in the global LGBTIQ community who are affected by the current pandemic.
Stay tuned for our next installment of The Resilience Divide in a few weeks!
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