The Intersectionality of Gender, Sexual Identity, and Disability in Disaster Risk Reduction in OECD Countries: A Rapid Scoping Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,
Thank you for your work. It's unsettling to see the dearth of relevant studies on the topic. I hope the comments below will help you improve and sharpen your main points.

1) What's the larger purpose of this review? To inform policymakers, disaster relief organizations, other decision-makers, to do what? It's not clear from your findings and you are not offering substantive insights for their decision-making.

2) In Review Questions and Inclusion Criteria:

2. What are the key challenges faced by people with disability who are women, men, gender and sexually diverse before, during, and after disasters? (I would also examine how different these challenges are from those faced by nondisabled groups)

3. What are the identified enablers/recommended strategies (from whose perspective)for the inclusion of this cohort in disaster risk reduction? (Here too, I would check why and how the existing strategies in disaster risk reduction are faulty and if different strategies are needed, what would these be?)

 

3) In Table 1, Item 3 "Disability", you didn't include "multiple disabilities". Why? Including it may alter the key challenges and the recommended strategies.

Table 1, Item 4 "Disaster preparedness, response or recovery" -- you didn't consider mass shootings among the terms for disasters (more common in the US, but also happening in Europe). Would that make a difference if you did? Address it in the study limitations.

4) In Table 1, it's unclear if you include displaced people with disability. There is a lot of good literature on this group, considering intersectionality. I didn't see it in your references. There are a lot of displaced people from Syria for example in Turkey (an OECD country) and good literature on the topic.

5) Overall, the reviewed literature seemed to be more focused on the use of technology in challenges and recommendations. I would have expected a more comprehensive account of challenges, especially regarding the availability of the needed services, such as health, education, living environment, legal protections, contextual factors, etc. and the recommendations for addressing them.

6) Rewrite your Conclusions section to better answer the research questions you pose in the beginning and address the impacts on this population you mention only very briefly.

7) Minor issue: inconsistent use of the serial (Oxford) comma (e.g., see line 15; lines 33-34; 35; 36; 45).

 

Author Response

1) What's the larger purpose of this review? To inform policymakers, disaster relief organizations, other decision-makers, to do what? It's not clear from your findings and you are not offering substantive insights for their decision-making.

It is indeed essential to clarify the broader purpose of this scoping review. The findings of this review have been instrumental in informing the development of training resources tailored to individuals affected by disasters and those involved in the emergency management sector in Australia. Additional text added to clarify this – line 69-73

2) In Review Questions and Inclusion Criteria:

What are the key challenges faced by people with disability who are women, men, gender and sexually diverse before, during, and after disasters? (I would also examine how different these challenges are from those faced by nondisabled groups)

Thank you for this suggestion.  This comparison was not part of the scope of this study and would a possibility for a future review.  This review aimed to encompass a broad overview and exploration of the existing literature and future work could be to compare and contrast challenges faced by nondisabled groups.

 

What are the identified enablers/recommended strategies (from whose perspective)for the inclusion of this cohort in disaster risk reduction? (Here too, I would check why and how the existing strategies in disaster risk reduction are faulty and if different strategies are needed, what would these be?)

This is a useful suggestion for future work. We adopted a scoping review method as they are exploratory and descriptive in nature with the primary aim being to synthesize existing evidence, identify knowledge gaps, and lay the foundation for future research. We chose not to do a systematic review as we wanted to explore the extant literature rather than conduct assessments of bias, draw specific conclusions about the evidence. Our reference: Pollock, D., Davies, E., Peters, M. D. J., Tricco, A. C., Alexander, L., McInerney, P., … & Munn, Z. (2021). Undertaking a scoping review: a practical guide for nursing and midwifery students, clinicians, researchers, and academics. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 77(4), 2102-2113. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.14743

In Table 1, Item 3 "Disability", you didn't include "multiple disabilities". Why? Including it may alter the key challenges and the recommended strategies.

Thank you, we discussed this with the team and librarian who did the protocol and searches, and it was agreed that this would have been picked up by the search term 'disability'.

Table 1, Item 4 "Disaster preparedness, response or recovery" -- you didn't consider mass shootings among the terms for disasters (more common in the US, but also happening in Europe). Would that make a difference if you did? Address it in the study limitations.

We were focusing more on what is considered to be 'natural' hazards vs 'man made' that includes mass shootings and have added a sentence to clarify this – lines 96-97.

4) In Table 1, it's unclear if you include displaced people with disability. See lines 231-232 – included in the grey literature There is a lot of good literature on this group, considering intersectionality. I didn't see it in your references. There are a lot of displaced people from Syria for example in Turkey (an OECD country) and good literature on the topic.

Thank you, we discussed this with the team and it was decided that this would have been picked up by the search term 'disability'. Displaced people were referred to in the grey literature and included in our analysis.

5) Overall, the reviewed literature seemed to be more focused on the use of technology in challenges and recommendations. I would have expected a more comprehensive account of challenges, especially regarding the availability of the needed services, such as health, education, living environment, legal protections, contextual factors, etc. and the recommendations for addressing them.

The expectation for a more comprehensive account of challenges and recommendations related to the availability of various services and contextual factors is indeed reasonable. Our scoping review, however, aimed to encompass a broad overview of the existing literature, and it has revealed a notable knowledge gap in these specific areas. The literature that met inclusion criteria discussed the use of technology as all the research was conducted in the context of COVID-19, hence the focus on this in the findings and discussion.

6) Rewrite your Conclusions section to better answer the research questions you pose in the beginning and address the impacts on this population you mention only very briefly.

Conclusion developed further – lines 379-384

7) Minor issue: inconsistent use of the serial (Oxford) comma (e.g., see line 15; lines 33-34; 35; 36; 45).

Thank you for identifying these errors.  The text checked for inconsistencies and corrected.

 

 

 

 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to review this interesting scoping review article. Overall, I found the article to be well written and informative. Below are some suggested comments that will strengthen the paper and help situate it better within the broader DRR literature. 

 

Introduction: 

The introduction section reads well, however it could be strengthened by including more key literature. See recommended readings. From my knowledge, this is the first review conducted on the intersections of disability and sexuality and gender diversity in DRR, thus I think it is perhaps important to also state that this paper will highlight the gaps in our current understanding of this topic but also the gaps in policy and practice. 

 

Review process/methods: 

It is not clear why your focus was OECD countries. This excludes a lot of countries. A justification for this decision is needed. In addition, what do you mean by ‘context?’ Does this mean you are only including papers that focus on OECD countries? Clarification is needed. Furthermore, what was your reasoning for only including literature from 2010 onwards? Related to my earlier comment, a clear explanation is needed as to why you only included empirical studies from OECD countries but broadened your inclusion criteria for the grey literature. Your current rationale isn’t justifiable. 

While your search terms are vast and I commend you for the breadth and depth of the terms, I have to highlight that you are missing “SOGIESC” (sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics). This acronym is widely used and is starting to be favoured over the common “LGBTQIA+.” I highly recommend you include this to your search. 

 

Results: 

These are very interesting results which highlight huge gaps in the literature concerning diverse sexual orientation and gender. The included literature very much still speaks to the gender binary.   You’ve not quite showcased this point and I think it’s something to highlight, perhaps in your discussion section. 

 

Discussion: 

This is a detailed discussion but could be strengthened by including what is not discussed in the literature. Where are the gaps? For example, a lot of the literature focuses on COVID-19, which is understandable, but what does this mean in terms of other disasters? Can lessons learnt from COVID-19 be easily transferred to understandings about disasters in general? I would think not, given that even specific natural hazards such as an earthquake will vary from earthquake to earthquake, let alone the differences between earthquake and wildfire. I think this gap is important to highlight. See Phibb’s work on Christchurch. It may also be worth including a note on the general lack of inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in policy and practices. This at times is very political, and some organisations are reluctant to include ‘controversial’ ideas that may bother more conservative states. What does this mean in terms of inclusion and exclusion? Risk and vulnerability? There are many more different angles you could include in your discussion to give it more depth. 

 

 

Recommendations: 

This is a detailed section that reviews the recommendations noted in the literature, however I was curious what the author’s recommendations would be. Do you agree with what the literatures recommend? Is there anything missing? 

 

Conclusion: 

The conclusion is ok as it recaps what was laid out in the paper, but I think you needed to include the gaps here. Where next from here? What do we need to focus on in DRR?

 

 

 

Minor suggestions: 

 

-       P2, line 69: “Human research ethics approval was not required as there was no collection of primary data.” I’m not sure this sentence is necessary as it is obvious ethics would not be needed.

-       P11, line 166: be careful here. You state that “multiple vulnerabilities such as gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, age.” These are not vulnerabilities. Vulnerability stems from inequities and power imbalances, not from identities and characteristics.  

 

Recommended reading

 

-        Phibbs, S., Good, G., Severinsen, C., Woodbury, E., & Williamson, K. (2015). Emergency preparedness and perceptions of vulnerability among disabled people following the Christchurch earthquakes: Applying lessons learnt to the Hyogo Framework for Action. Australasian Journal of Disaster and Trauma Studies, 19, 37

-        Rushton, A., Phibbs, S., Kenney, C., & Anderson, C. (2020). The gendered body politic in disaster policy and practice. International journal of disaster risk reduction, 47, 101648

-        Good, G. A., Phibbs, S., & Williamson, K. (2016). Disoriented and immobile: the experiences of people with visual impairments during and after the Christchurch, New Zealand, 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, 110(6), 425-435

-        Rushton, A., Gray, L., Canty, J., & Blanchard, K. (2019). Beyond binary:(re) defining “gender” for 21st century disaster risk reduction research, policy, and practice. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(20), 3984

-        Gaillard, J. C., Gorman-Murray, A., & Fordham, M. (2017). Sexual and gender minorities in disaster. Gender, Place & Culture, 24(1), 18-26

-        Balgos, B., Gaillard, J. C., & Sanz, K. (2012). The warias of Indonesia in disaster risk reduction: the case of the 2010 Mt Merapi eruption in Indonesia. Gender & Development, 20(2), 337-348

Author Response

Introduction: 

The introduction section reads well, however it could be strengthened by including more key literature. See recommended readings. From my knowledge, this is the first review conducted on the intersections of disability and sexuality and gender diversity in DRR, thus I think it is perhaps important to also state that this paper will highlight the gaps in our current understanding of this topic but also the gaps in policy and practice. 

Thank you for identifying how we can strengthen the argument and providing some readings.  The introduction and results have been amended to include statements as suggested – lines 30-31, 46-50, 366-368.

Review process/methods: 

It is not clear why your focus was OECD countries. This excludes a lot of countries. A justification for this decision is needed. In addition, what do you mean by ‘context?’ Does this mean you are only including papers that focus on OECD countries? Clarification is needed. Furthermore, what was your reasoning for only including literature from 2010 onwards? Related to my earlier comment, a clear explanation is needed as to why you only included empirical studies from OECD countries but broadened your inclusion criteria for the grey literature. Your current rationale isn’t justifiable. 

While your search terms are vast and I commend you for the breadth and depth of the terms, I have to highlight that you are missing that you are missing “SOGIESC” (sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics). This acronym is widely used and is starting to be favoured over the common “LGBTQIA+.” I highly recommend you include this to your search.

The choice of focusing on OECD countries aligns with the Australian context, making the findings relevant and transferable to our region.  An additional sentence has been added to the manuscript to provide a rationale for focusing on OECD countries – lines 94-96.

The rationale for the wider criteria for grey literature has been made clearer – lines 109-111.

We drew from literature since 2010 as we wanted to explore what is know in the more recent literature.

Thank you for your advice regarding the use of SOGIESC.  We will adopt this in future work.  We conducted a quick search on PubMed/Medline using the term 'SOGIESC' and found only three results. One of them included ‘disability’ as well, but none of them are associated with disaster. As such we don't believe that this additional search will change our results.  At the time we consulted with a colleague who identifies and writes on this group and they didn't mention this acronym and recommended LGBTQ+ be used, however this acronym will be used in the future.

Results: 

These are very interesting results which highlight huge gaps in the literature concerning diverse sexual orientation and gender. The included literature very much still speaks to the gender binary.   You’ve not quite showcased this point and I think it’s something to highlight, perhaps in your discussion section. 

Thank you for noting this.  A sentence has been added to the discussion to highlight this point – line169-172.

Discussion: 

This is a detailed discussion but could be strengthened by including what is not discussed in the literature. Where are the gaps? For example, a lot of the literature focuses on COVID-19, which is understandable, but what does this mean in terms of other disasters? Can lessons learnt from COVID-19 be easily transferred to understandings about disasters in general? I would think not, given that even specific natural hazards such as an earthquake will vary from earthquake to earthquake, let alone the differences between earthquake and wildfire. I think this gap is important to highlight. See Phibb’s work on Christchurch. It may also be worth including a note on the general lack of inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in policy and practices. This at times is very political, and some organisations are reluctant to include ‘controversial’ ideas that may bother more conservative states. What does this mean in terms of inclusion and exclusion? Risk and vulnerability? There are many more different angles you could include in your discussion to give it more depth. 

 Thank you for identifying the need to highlight the gaps more clearly.  Some had been discussed part of the limitations but this has been further developed -  to lines 249-250, and 364-368 in the discussion. The lack of inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in policy and practice has also been included in the manuscript – lines 249-250.

Recommendations: 

This is a detailed section that reviews the recommendations noted in the literature, however I was curious what the author’s recommendations would be. Do you agree with what the literatures recommend? Is there anything missing? 

A critique of the recommendations was provided (lines 311, 315-336), however the intent of adopting the scoping review method was to explore and describe the literature. We chose not to do a systematic that included assessments of bias and draw specific conclusions about the evidence. Our reference: Pollock, D., Davies, E., Peters, M. D. J., Tricco, A. C., Alexander, L., McInerney, P., … & Munn, Z. (2021). Undertaking a scoping review: a practical guide for nursing and midwifery students, clinicians, researchers, and academics. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 77(4), 2102-2113. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.14743

Conclusion: 

The conclusion is ok as it recaps what was laid out in the paper, but I think you needed to include the gaps here. Where next from here? What do we need to focus on in DRR?

 The last paragraph of the discussion has been restructured and the sentence regarding future research moved to the conclusion – lines 395-298. 

Minor suggestions: 

-       P2, line 69: “Human research ethics approval was not required as there was no collection of primary data.” I’m not sure this sentence is necessary as it is obvious ethics would not be needed.

Agreed, and sentence removed as suggested.

-       P11, line 166: be careful here. You state that “multiple vulnerabilities such as gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, age.” These are not vulnerabilities. Vulnerability stems from inequities and power imbalances, not from identities and characteristics.  

Thank you for noting this error – the text has been amended with ‘vulnerability’ removed and replaced with ‘identities and characteristics’ – line 181.  Other text checked for this.

 

 

 

 

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to review this high quality and relevant article. I have minor comments focused on the discussion section, provided below.

Line 204 - consider more inclusive language which recognises the many adult roles involved in the life of children, particularly relevant to LGBTQ communities and families of choice.

Line 234 - how do the authors suggest this limited understanding is framed within the data reported above? 

Line 243 - was this only for gender diverse people?

Line 265 - this is perhaps a simplification of the original article, but reads as naive to the reality of the lives of many people with disability.

I am left wondering what LGBTQ-specific lens was discernible in the literature reporting lived experience, what it specifically said about LGBTQ people (the discussion is interesting but could equally be applied to all women, or all people with disability when LGBTQ status was a factor for inquiry). What can the authors pull out or identify as related to LGBTQ status?

 

Author Response

Line 204 - consider more inclusive language which recognises the many adult roles involved in the life of children, particularly relevant to LGBTQ communities and families of choice.

Thank you, your recommendation noted and we agree, however this language was reported by the authors of the study and specifically discussed mothers and daughters in their findings. We have amended our critique to ‘male parent’ instead of father – line 219.

Line 234 - how do the authors suggest this limited understanding is framed within the data reported above? 

As this is a scoping review that is exploratory and descriptive, we do not provide an evaluation of how the data is reported in the included research and reports. Rather we are noting the gaps in what is included and reported.

Line 243 - was this only for gender diverse people?

Text amended to include sexually diverse people – line 259.