In the Deluge of Violence: Domestic Abuse, Security and the Climate Crisis

The climate crisis, once on the margins of political conversations, is now inscribed on security and development agendas. Current evidence demonstrates that anthropogenic contributions, meaning human activities, are the main drivers of the climate crisis leading to more frequent and intense extreme events. The effects of the climate crisis are not ‘gender neutral’ as women’s exposure to domestic abuse (DA) is exacerbated. Women are more vulnerable to the adverse effects of the climate crisis, and they are also likely to find it more challenging to deal with its impacts owing to gender inequalities which are suggestive of broader unequal power relations. The silent yet ubiquitous issue of DA remains outside the traditional purview of security studies which uses a state-centric framing of the climate crisis, seeing it as a threat to national security and linking it to the escalation of armed conflict, thereby endorsing a militarisation of environmental issues. Gender lenses, such as those used by feminist security studies (FSS) scholars, in contrast, illuminate how DA is a security threat to women that is worsened in human-induced extreme event settings. Case studies from two climate-change hotspots rife with gender inequalities, Australia and India, demonstrate that women are disproportionately affected by DA in times of extreme events. Considering that DA is a multidimensional security threat that leaves both short-term and long-term scars on women, existing state-centric notions of climate security are inadequate to address the gendered vulnerability of DA, necessitating the incorporation of gender lenses into security research and praxis.