Gender and gender-based violence in disaster contexts in Canada: A systematic review of the literature

Abstract

Gender is well-recognized as a social characteristic associated with increased susceptibility to adverse outcomes in disaster contexts, with cisgender women and gender and sexual minorities being recognized as high-risk populations. One of the most distressing gendered impacts observed across the globe during disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic, is an increase in gender-based violence (GBV) affecting women. While the body of knowledge about gender and GBV in disaster contexts has been growing since the 1990s, more attention has been given to these issues in international disaster and humanitarian response settings, rather than in industrialized nation contexts. The goal of this systematic review was to establish the nature and scope of peer-reviewed research on gender and GBV in disasters within the Canadian context. For this review, we searched the EBSCOhost and ProQuest databases as well as Google Scholar records to identify journal articles addressing gender and disaster, including GBV in disaster. Of the 553 records initially meeting our search criteria, 25 articles were eligible for inclusion in the final review. Only nine of these articles were published before the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings of studies included in our review were generally consistent with identified themes in the broader body of literature. This review provides a baseline of the state of the published research on gender and disaster, with specific attention to GBV in the Canadian context as of 2023. There is a moral imperative to give further attention to researching the gendered impacts of disaster, as this body of knowledge has the potential to lead to improved outcomes for populations at disproportionate risk for adverse impacts during disaster events.