Peer-reviewed article
Gender-based violence and infectious disease in humanitarian settings: lessons learned from Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19 to inform syndemic policy making
Melissa Meinhart, Luissa Vahedi, Simone Carter, Catherine Poulton, Philomene Mwanze Palaku et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This peer-reviewed article examines how gender-based violence and infectious diseases mutually reinforce each other in humanitarian crises, using lessons from Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19. The authors show that disease outbreaks increase violence against women and girls, while experiences of violence increase disease transmission. The paper identifies that existing policies have failed to address this interconnected problem and proposes a syndemic framework with three key questions for policymakers to better protect vulnerable populations.
Key points
- Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19 exacerbated gender-based violence risk in humanitarian settings
- Increased experience of gender-based violence correlated with higher community transmission of infectious diseases
- Infectious disease control measures have consistently lacked critical gender considerations
- A syndemic approach is needed that addresses the bi-directional reinforcement between GBV and infectious disease
- Existing policies have failed to address the mutually deleterious linkage between these two issues
Limitations
This is a policy analysis and literature review rather than an empirical study, so it cannot provide quantitative evidence of specific prevalence rates or intervention effectiveness. The paper focuses on humanitarian settings but does not distinguish outcomes across different country contexts or specific populations within those settings.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The impacts of infectious disease outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics are not gender neutral. Instead, infectious diseases and gender-based violence (GBV) mutually reinforce each other. Women and girls in humanitarian settings are disproportionately impacted as crises exacerbate gender inequality, violence, and community transmission. A syndemic model of infectious disease and GBV draws attention to their critical linkage, enabling more effective approaches to address both infectious disease transmission and GBV prevalence. MAIN BODY: Implementation of infectious disease control measures have been consistently absent of critical gender considerations in humanitarian settings. We drew learnings from Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19 to highlight how women and girls living in humanitarian settings have faced bi-directional syndemic vulnerabilities between GBV and infectious disease. Our findings indicate that Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19 exacerbated GBV risk and experience of GBV increased community transmission of these infectious diseases. Moreover, we identified a failure of existing policies to address this mutually deleterious linkage. Thus, we advocate for policymakers to ask three foundational questions: (i) What are the gendered bi-directional risk pathways between infectious disease and GBV?; (ii) How can we act on the gendered risk pathways?; and, (iii) Who should be involved in designing, implementing, and evaluating gender-sensitive policies? CONCLUSION: Our syndemic policy framework challenges existing thinking on a neglected issue that disproportionally impacts women and girls. By offering foundational guidance to address and thwart the syndemic of infectious disease and GBV in humanitarian settings, we endeavor to proactively and holistically address the reinforcing linkage between GBV and current or emergent infectious diseases.