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A woman lived in fear when her husband started drunkenly hitting her car and throwing glass bottles at her.
Another recognized her partner’s worsening abuse when her young son suddenly told a stranger, “My dad is really mean to my mom.”
And while another woman is driving down a country road, her husband suddenly pulls on the parking brake during an argument.
It’s been more than a decade since these stories of domestic violence following the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria were shared in remarkable study show that gender-based violence escalates after a disaster.
Since then, research has revealed dramatic peaks in domestic violence during the Millennium Drought, during the Covid-19 lockdown and after the 2022 flood disaster in NSW’s Northern Rivers.
Communications were destroyed during the floods, forcing officers to call women using small aerials attached to generators in their cars, according to a post-disaster report by peak body Domestic Violence NSW.
“This is war zone stuff,” a worker said in a plea to a state parliamentary inquiry.
But despite years of mounting evidence, Australian researchers say climate and environmental policies still do not adequately recognize the greater dangers women face during and after disasters.
Women are 14 times more likely to die in a natural disaster and account for 80% of people displaced as a result, according to Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia.
“The impacts are not uniform at all,” said the organization’s research manager Carla Pascoe Leahy.
“There is social disadvantage, but women are also economically disadvantaged and … when a crisis occurs, they have less security and less resources to draw on.”
Violence against women often escalates during times of disaster, as traditional gender roles tend to become more deeply entrenched, the report said.
While men generally take on roles considered heroic – such as flood rescue, firefighting, cleaning and reconstruction – women carry a greater burden of care work.
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Steve O’Malley, an emergency responder, teaches first responders how gendered expectations can normalize violence during extreme events.
“Research … found that the perpetrators of violence were men who also responded to the disaster, so there was a sense that they should be forgiven,” O’Malley said.
“There’s a conflation of the causes of violence – which is power and the choice to be violent – but the community has forgiven it because of what the men have been through.”
He believes that preventing gender-based violence should be the “core business” of the often male-dominated emergency sector.
Dr Pascoe Leahy, who led the research on women’s leadership, said there was a need to look at environmental policies to better protect vulnerable groups from the disproportionate effects of disasters.
“We have great research in the Australian context that policymakers can use to start responding to this,” she said.
“It has to get on their radar.”
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