Project name: Women, Violence and Displacement in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal
This project was an 18-month (September 2017- March 2019) multi-country study funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and the Department for International Development’s ‘New Frontiers in Development’ call. In addition to the UoP as the lead, our consortium includes the Nepal Centre for Contemporary Research, IMC Worldwide, and an additional country partner in Myanmar Socio-Economic & Gender Resource Institute.
The research explored the impact of internal displacement on the occurrence of violence against women in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal. There has been very little research focused on this issue and as such the data is intended to inform a range of stakeholders in the humanitarian sector.
The project developed an innovative methodology comprising a mix of quantitative and qualitative tools.
The approach also included a specially designed phone-app that can carry the dual function of rapid data collection in instances of sudden disastrous change and support the emergence of critical support networks linking to relevant organisations.
Core Research Question:
What is the impact of internal displacement on the occurrence of violence against women in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal?
As part of the longitudinal dimension to the project the team developed the displacement narrator approach.
Capturing longitudinal data in remote and/or fragile contexts is difficult. The research objectives focused on understanding and documenting the impact of a disaster or conflict on the most vulnerable and it becomes more complex still.
However, the impact of a natural disaster, conflict or global pandemic was unlikely to take a uniform impact either in terms of whose lives it changes or even when the most detrimental change hits.
It was, therefore, necessary to monitor and track shifts in how a situation unfolds and over a longitudinal time frame. Conventional methods can be costly and require the fielding of multiple researchers and data collectors and indeed cannot not be done safely during a pandemic.
In designing a mixed method approach for a study looking at links between women, violence and environmental displacement in Nepal we added to the quantitative survey and qualitative interviews a tool we coined ‘displacement narrators’.
Out of the women interviewed as part of the qualitative method a number were selected to act as narrators. They were contacted every three to four weeks and over a period of eighteen months.