Politicising Infrastructure, Materialising Stigma
Violence.
When we think of the word, our mind often wanders to images of fighting and war. But this week's blog presents an alternative understanding of 'violence': symbolic. It imagines a concept that is embedded within gendered roles; that which is led by the State and materialises through infrastructure. Arguably, violence can be silent and socially accepted.
Rogers and O’Neill understand discrimination as operative through broken, absent or disconnected infrastructure. By distinguishing between those who have access to a safe, nearby water supply and those who don’t, the State maps which citizens are of low social significance, poor economic background and weak political visibility.
Across African space and time, such infrastructural violence has targeted women; the second-class citizens of society. Absent or broken supplies condition females to daily walks for water. This is particularly true for rural women, establishing a rural-urban divide that demonstrates the spatiality of stigma. Their poor socio-economic background places them in a position of heightened vulnerability: in comparison to the 80% of urban households which have a tap, only 30% of the rural poor do. As they walk to access a source, symbolic violence is reproduced and reinforced.
Exploiting Women
Stemming from this infrastructural violence is the insecurity of women, creating a geography of fear upon the journey to collect water. Many females are subjected to rape, with their chances increasing exponentially as daylight fades and nighttime looms. The lack of streetlight aids the perpetrator's crime and presents an additional gendered impact infrastructural violence:
Figure 1: Sex For Water Project
Women have also recorded fights within the queue at the water point and abuse upon returning home to their husbands with "inadequate" quantities.
The act of collecting water is an inherently violent, gendered task.
‘Sex for Water’
Set in Kibera, Nairobi's largest slum, the 'Sex For Water' project demonstrates this multidimensional violence. 91.7% of residents, in which 79.2% are women, have to walk 300m or more to collect water each day. When reaching the infrastructure, nearly 60% recorded a queueing time longer than 15 minutes, due to insufficient water availability and high demand. At or along the route to water points, the project also documented accounts of female-based violence. 87.9% of the participants recorded at least one instance of sexual assault (Figure 2).
Whilst the project was able to conduct interviews and retrieve accounts from several women, these instances go largely unreported to officials, due to feelings of guilt, shame and social stigmatisation. In fact, the report states that the majority of survivors didn’t see the "need of reporting" due to the normalisation of sexual abuse. Infrastructural violence is both deafening and silenced.
State Solutions
Through infrastructure, the Kenyan State mediates which demographic identity is undeserving of both water and security. Acting as a microcosm for symbolic violence, the water sector repeatedly fails women on the basis of socio-economic hierarchies.
Arguably, the State bears the responsibility of facilitating and maintaining power imbalances. By implementing gender-sensitive solutions (Figure 3), it could end the synonymous relationship between water and violence. However, in order to do that, the State must first recognise its symbolic role...
Notably, as I came across research for this week’s blog, I questioned why infrastructure was so disjointed across the continent. A plausible explanation is rooted in colonialism and consequently, must be exposed.
When colonisers implemented racial segregation across towns, this resulted in isolated infrastructural improvements - restricted to European enclaves. Once the colonial period ended, the existing infrastructure wasn’t properly maintained and in other places, ceased to exist at all. Therefore, colonialism set the stage for infrastructural inequality, demonstrating that contemporary issues often arise out of past injustice.
A well presented analysis of infrastructural violence in relation to water and gender in Ethiopia, good engagement with literature and references are well embeded. I was wondering what is the implication of climate change on infrastructural violence but also how are local communities adapting to evolving water violence in relaiton to gender and climate.
ReplyDeleteThank you Clement! I think that it's crucial to address the impacts of water violence upon women as a result of climate change and will read more about this, in order to address the intersections within a future blog.
DeleteHi Ellie, I like how you have included potential solutions to the issue but I wanted to ask to what extent do you think the state are incentivised to intervene and protect women from violence caused due to the lack of water infrastructure? Do you think this is something that should be addressed from the top or should countries take a more bottom up and local approach?
ReplyDeleteHi Anda, thank you for reading my blog! These are really important questions. Whilst I think that the local scale is important, since gender inequality is such a widespread issue - continental - I think that a top-down approach is required. Large-scale intervention is likely to have a greater impact and can inform legal frameworks and policies. As policies change, I think social attitudes will. Hickey (2004) wrote about this and argued that multi-scaled interventions are necessary because gender transformations need to reach beyond the local impact of NGOs and small communities. However, this isn't to say that the work of gender-mainstreaming by NGOs is unhelpful. Gender equality needs to be tackled from a range of levels.
DeleteAlso - I think that it is the responsibility of the state to implement more water sources and of better quality. In turn, this should reduce gendered violence as women won't have to walk as far to access water - reducing their exposure to sexual abuse. However, this does imply that gendered safety happens to be a consequence of improved water infrastructure, rather than a central theme within the sector. Female violence needs to be addressed directly, in order to demonstrate that the State are taking it seriously and value women as much as they do men.
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