Narratives of violence: the impact of internal displacement on violence against women in Nepal and Myanmar

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Myanmar and Nepal are countries in transition. Both have recently emerged from long-term civil conflicts, and their populations have been afflicted by natural disasters. As a result these two countries have seen rates of internal displacement among the highest in the world (e.g. in 2015, 9200 per 100,000 residents in Nepal, and 3000 per 100,000 in Myanmar). We will document women's explanations of how displacement has affected gendered relations and women's resultant experiences of violence. This will involve collecting unstructured narratives and quantitative data from women who have experienced rural-urban displacement.This project represents a completely new avenue of inquiry. A previous project, 'Women, Work and Violence', enabled the UoP, IMC, Nepal Centre for Contemporary Research and UNDP Myanmar to establish a successful partnership, combining expertise in communication and impact/uptake strategies (IMC/UNDP) with research and capacity building expertise (UoP/NCCR). Quantitative data establishes correlations across different demographics. It also generates a mass of evidence needed to leverage policy influence. However, the experience of the research partners points to the utility of an unstructured narrative approach in asking women to share personal, sensitive experiences. We will combine these approaches, conducting narrative interviews in addition to working with the UNDP, who have developed a mobile phone app for quantatitive data collection. The app is currently accessed by 2000 women as part of the UNDP's Self Reliance programme in Myanmar. We will subsequently create an online data archive, providing a rich resource of personal insights that will benefit both the academy and stakeholders working in women's development. We fully intend for this archive to support the building of a sustained secure and positive future for female survivors of displacement and violence. This goal will be driven by a South-South 'community of practice'.