With nearly 6.3 million people displaced and thousands of villages submerged in Punjab, the recent floods have once again laid bare how disasters amplify structural inequalities. Women and children, already among society’s most vulnerable, face not only the loss of shelter and livelihood but also the erosion of safety, dignity, and survival. Relief camps meant to serve as sanctuaries often become sites where hunger, insecurity, and harassment converge.
Hunger emerges as the most immediate crisis. Food supplies in camps are scarce, unevenly distributed, and rarely designed to meet the specific needs of women, particularly those who are pregnant or lactating. In many families, women eat last and least, sacrificing their own sustenance for children and elders. This normalisation of deprivation reflects what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic violence, an ingrained acceptance of inequality so deeply embedded in daily life that it escapes recognition as injustice.
Yet hunger is not the only deprivation. In overcrowded shelters lacking adequate sanitation and privacy, women and girls encounter heightened risks of harassment and abuse. The fears expressed by displaced mothers – where can their daughters sleep safely at night, how can they preserve dignity without water in washrooms – are stark reminders of how social protection collapses in moments of displacement. Ulrich Beck’s notion of the risk society explains this dynamic well: disasters do not distribute suffering evenly but intensify the vulnerabilities of those already marginalised by culture and structure.
Hunger and harassment in displacement are not incidental, but consequences of social hierarchies and governance failures
Cultural norms exacerbate these challenges. Practices such as purdah and women’s economic dependency, often intended as protective, become obstacles in displacement. Restricted mobility denies women direct access to aid, forcing reliance on male relatives for even the most basic necessities. Judith Butler’s idea of precarity captures this reality: women’s survival is undermined less by floodwaters themselves than by social arrangements that strip them of autonomy and visibility in moments of crisis.
What is most troubling is how governance repeatedly overlooks these gendered realities. Relief operations emphasise tents, rations, and medicines – undeniably essential – but fail to account for the social dimensions of vulnerability. Without gender-sensitive planning, camps remain unsafe and inadequate. Addressing this gap requires more than technical efficiency; it demands moral imagination. Relief must guarantee food distribution tailored to women’s needs, provide secure and well-lit sanitation facilities, establish monitored spaces to prevent harassment, and design culturally appropriate mechanisms through which women can access aid directly. Equally vital is psychosocial and educational support for displaced girls, whose interrupted schooling often leads to early marriage or exploitative labour.
Despite systemic neglect, women continue to hold fractured communities together – cooking with scarce supplies, caring for children and elders, and sustaining a semblance of order amid chaos. Their resilience embodies hope, but resilience should never become an excuse for institutional inaction. Hope must be matched with justice, and justice begins with recognition: that hunger and harassment in displacement are not incidental, but consequences of social hierarchies and governance failures.