Rates of violence spike during heat waves. Are community services prepared for a hotter world?

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Over the course of a week in June 2021, the sixth hottest heat wave ever recorded worldwide killed over 600 people in British Columbia. Trapped inside stifling homes, mostly without air conditioning, they died of exposure to the 40 C heat. Most were over the age of 70, lived in low-income neighbourhoods, and suffered from health conditions that worsened their chances of surviving the heat dome.

Heat waves may be among the most insidious of the many climate disasters affecting communities today. They don’t often provoke an emergency response from local authorities the same way a wildfire or mass flood might, but they can be just as deadly – and not just due to overheating. Gender-based violence didn’t show up in the B.C. Coroner’s report on last summer’s West Coast heat dome, but it was undoubtedly experienced by women across the province.

“Gender is one of the most decisive factors in determining the level of risk that a person will face from climate shocks, but also the resources they will have to respond and recover from the shocks that they face, including heat waves,” says Emily Wiseman, senior gender equity advisor at CARE Canada. “There are significant connections between those extreme weather events and increases in gender-based violence.”

Though they may not seem linked, heat waves and gender-based violence share remarkable similarities. They are both endemic in our society today, rarely considered to be preventable disasters – such as fires or power outages – and have been studied exhaustively by scientists.

In fact, both extreme heat and gender-based violence overwhelmingly affect women, especially those who are Indigenous and disabled. The former are seven times more likely to be assaulted than non-Indigenous people, and also live on land warming faster than the Canadian average. Roughly a third of all women will experience violence in their lifetime, yet Dawn Canada, a disability organization, found 40 per cent of disabled women reported it. Although the B.C. Coroner’s report into last summer’s heat dome didn’t say how disability played a role in fatalities, it did note many of the victims had chronic health conditions, including heart failure and dementia, which may have impacted their mobility or cognition.

The risks of heat-triggered violence have been known for decades, yet there isn’t much funding or government policy specifically to help gender-based violence prevention organizations cope with more frequent heat waves in the future. With the current rate of crises, including the lingering COVID-19 pandemic, frontline organizations are just trying to stay afloat.

Heat and the human body

Anyone who has tried to fall asleep during a brutally hot night can attest to how uncomfortable it can be. Places unaccustomed to intense heat waves like Canada’s West Coast or the U.K. might not be equipped with air conditioning or architecture designed to expel heat, as is often found in the Middle East or the Mediterranean. Without sufficient rest, we grow tired and cranky – and more likely to lose our tempers. “It’s a big factor,” says Dann Mitchell, a professor of climate science at the University of Bristol in the U.K. “We often say that the nighttime temperature is the most important one for domestic violence.”

Throw an abusive partner into the mix under these conditions and an otherwise routine argument could turn violent. This isn’t hypothetical. A 2018 paper in Science of the Total Environment, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, looked at gender-based violence in the Spanish city of Madrid and found the risk of gender-based violence went up nearly 30 per cent starting about three days after a heat wave of at least 34 C.

The same is true for other types of violence. As quoted in a 2021 commentary in The Lancet, a 5 C rise in daily mean temperature across seven U.S. cities in a 10-year timeframe coincided with a 4.5 percent rise in sexual offences up to eight days after a heat wave began. In Japan, a three-year study found EMS calls for assault victims rose with the temperature. And a 2014 paper chillingly predicted climate change could trigger an additional 22,000 murders and 2.3 million assaults in the United States alone by the year 2100.

But when it comes to violence prevention, extreme heat isn’t the only climate-related disaster of concern. Nearly any kind of extreme weather event, from floods to wildfires to drought, can lead to higher-than-average domestic violence rates. “We know that when communities are under stress, gender-based violence increases,” says Karen Campbell, director of community initiatives and policy at the Canadian Women’s Foundation.

Regardless of the source, climate disasters become major stressors. Unemployment can be a particularly serious consequence of climate disaster: If a wildfire or flood destroys a local business, workers might need to leave a community to find new jobs. Food insecurity and drought can present other problems. Wiseman says child marriages can become more common in the aftermath of a drought. Money issues are among the most serious stressors in any intimate relationship, and climate disasters can leave a community’s economy struggling for years.

Unfortunately, seeking help as a survivor of gender-based violence is hard enough in normal times. The vast majority of cases go unreported, and shelters are routinely short of beds. Except we are not in normal times. Gender-based violence prevention organizations are  more strapped than ever, and they simply haven’t had the time – or the money – to consider how heat waves may worsen their burgeoning caseloads.

An ‘eerie silence’ 

For Angela Marie McDougall, executive director of B.C. Battered Women’s Support Services, extreme heat events are just one of many overlapping crises affecting gender-based violence. It’s hard to really know. The COVID-19 pandemic brought on a spike in gender-based violence cases in 2020 – she says it hasn’t dropped. Add in flooding, along with worsening wildfire seasons, and the pressure points that exacerbate gender-based violence are already bruised.

Between 2020 and March 31 of 2022, McDougall says, BWSS saw nearly 95,000 calls for service due to domestic or sexual violence. “That’s huge for us,” she says. “It’s not even close. I can’t even calculate how big of an increase we’ve had in terms of requests for our services.

McDougall says she wants to understand how climate disasters impact gender-based violence, and BWSS tries to direct survivors to services during climate disasters whenever they can. But the whole gender-based violence prevention system is close to bursting. “These services are already oversubscribed because the need has escalated” McDougall says. “More survivors are coming forward, and the funding has not increased in terms of sustained response to what has been clearly a serious escalation in the number of cases.”

To make matters worse, heat waves are profoundly disruptive to organizations operating under intense stress. They don’t trigger a steady increase in abuse cases – one that might be noticed and addressed by funders. Instead, Campbell refers to the ‘eerie silence’ – a phenomenon where shelters see a drop in calls for help at the onset of an emergency, followed by a massive spike in need. In the Science of the Total Environment paper on heat waves and gender-based violence, the ‘eerie silence’ period lasts about three days after the heat wave begins.

Then, Mitchell says, gender-based violence prevention organizations might get a ton of calls all at once. Heatwaves also trigger all sorts of other problems. “You see increases in burglaries, increases in car crashes, suicides – all those sorts of things go up.” The sudden buildup in emergency calls all strain an already beleaguered community social service sector. If another climate disaster strikes, the result could be catastrophic.

The question isn’t whether gender-based violence prevention organizations do or don’t care about climate change. They don’t have the breathing room to adapt for more extreme heat waves a decade down the road. There is simply too much to do today. Nina Gorka, director of shelters and clinical services at YWCA Toronto, says all 14 of Toronto’s violence shelters meet regularly to discuss common issues. Climate change isn’t on the agenda. “That hasn’t been a topic of conversation as of yet,” she says.

Fortunately, some humanitarian sector professionals are already discussing how heat waves worsen gender-based violence. Research is plentiful, but funding grants to prepare gender-based violence prevention organizations for a hotter future are relatively sparse – as are concrete policies by governments to address the risk of gender-based violence during climate disasters.

Gender-based climate policy 

On the surface, climate advocates and gender-based violence prevention advocates don’t have a lot of common ground. The Houssian Foundation, a grantmaker in B.C., champions organizations tackling both issues, butexecutive director Mira Oreck admits they keep to their corners. “We don’t see as much intersection between the two as one would hope or imagine,” she says.

Governments are paying some attention to the connection. In May, the Canadian government announced $67.5 million in funding for eight projects working at the intersection of gender-based violence and climate change overseas, although only one specifically mentions gender-based violence as a focus.

In Oreck’s experience, climate organizations focus on big-picture concerns around carbon pollution without necessarily illustrating the effects it might have on someone’s day-to-day life. Linking gender-based violence to a process as abstract and all-encompassing as climate change also isn’t easy. Oreck says the Houssian Foundation is open to exploring projects that bridge the divide between climate and gender violence.

“We’ve typically tried to respond to the needs of what our grantees are asking for,” Oreck says. “And at the moment, this hasn’t come up. That doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t talk to them and explore it. I think it’s an interesting concept.”

The Canadian Women’s Foundation is going a step further. In fact, Campbell says, the grantmaker is working on a national project called Shockproofing Communities devoted to helping gender-based violence organizations cope with a rise in abuse following climate disasters. “A lot of that has to do with making sure that the sector is well-resourced in normal times, so that they have surge capacity when a disaster happens,” Campbell says. A summit by the foundation, planned for March 2023, will cover everything from talking about gender-based violence to working with disaster management systems.

CARE Canada’s approach is to alleviate the root causes of gender-based violence throughout its humanitarian and development programming. Introducing drought-resistant crops to a community not only ensures they are fed during a disaster – it also negates one of the risk factors for gender-based violence: hunger. But Wiseman says CARE also tries to build local climate and gender-based violence advocacy.

“We do a lot of work to support local women-led and women’s rights organizations at the local and international level,” Wiseman says, “and support them to respond to climate change and gender-based violence.” After all, she says, grassroots organizations tend to be the first to respond to crises. “But we also know they’ve been completely underrepresented in decision-making, including on climate and the environment.”

That lack of input is telling when one considers Canada’s blueprints for responding to climate disasters. Campbell says the Canadian Women’s Foundation dug into plans at all three levels of government looking for any references to gender-based violence. It didn’t find any.

“The organizations that we fund and that we work with on this are saying, ‘ Bring us to the table when you’re doing these plans’,” Campbell says. “We can tell you what the realities are for the communities that we work with.”

A hotter, more violent future

The science on extreme heat and its relationship to violence is crystal clear, both scientifically and in the everyday experiences of community social services. Yet awareness simply isn’t enough. “We can gather the evidence,” McDougall says, “but at the end of the day, we have to be taking action on these things.”

Not all governments or philanthropic funders will see the reason to do so, even if the proof is staring them directly in the face. To someone who isn’t harmed by a heat wave, it just looks like a hot day unlike any other. Mitchell says this trend even carries over to officials in countries like Kenya and Somalia, where searing temperatures are only bound to soar higher thanks to climate change.

“Convincing a community that these are issues they need to look at is very difficult, especially when they’re run by governments who are, by definition, in privileged positions,” Mitchell says. “It’s hard for them to always see that this is a problem.”

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