Hearing Minority Voices: Institutional Discrimination Towards LGBTQ in Disaster and Recovery

Within the themes of CASCADE NET, this paper focusses on less heard voices and the need to develop new social spaces. Disaster vulnerability identifies diversity in society through a lens of constraints to solutions, on such bases as demography, socio-economic status, cultural, ethnic and gendered minorities within society, and marginalized groups as well as physical proximity to a hazard. The focus of disaster risk reduction is on building resilience through the strengths and capacities in society, but it has a tendency to homogenize characteristics of resilience to the community level, thereby flattening and hiding diversity. LGBTQ people are largely ignored as minority groups with specific information needs. Specific response and recovery processes and actors exacerbate the vulnerability of the LGBTQ minority, especially in evacuation, support, counselling, and rehousing. The role of faith-based organizations (FBO) in providing these services during disaster relief and recovery is examined in this paper. This paper identifies and critiques the attitudes and practices of some FBO towards LGBTQ groups in their provision of disaster relief services.