Today, 25 November, marks the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. In this post, King’s Water PhD Researcher Amiera Sawas reflects on the role of water, particularly water for sanitation and hygiene (WASH), in gender-based violence.
There is a new growing field of research that challenges dominant assumptions about the drivers of violence in urban centres of the Global South. In 2012, O’Neill and Rogers (2012) introduced the idea of ‘infrastructural violence’: how infrastructure (housing, roads, streets, water supply and sanitation systems) layered with hierarchies of power translates into physical and psychological harm. The recent, tragic cases of sexual violence in India, where young women were raped and murdered while searching for a spot for defecation[1], and the brutal gang-rape and murder of a physiotherapy student on a moving private bus in Nirybhya, Delhi in 2012[2], have made it all too clear that poor infrastructure creates opportunities for violence [3][4]. A less explored, and perhaps more common, element of infrastructural violence is how poor infrastructure changes the way people interact with each other, potentially driving conflict and violence. These sorts of drivers can only be understood in their complexity by credible, extensive, ground-level research in the cities.
Continue reading “The Water-Gender-Violence Nexus in Developing Cities”