Abstract:
This study undertakes to critically investigate the issues of relocated women by considering five
indicators such as land, livelihood, social infrastructure, security, and community organization.
The main objective of the study is to analyze how the anomalies of relocated housing schemes
exacerbate the vulnerability in such social environments. The specific objectives of study are to
characterize women's roles in participatory recovery efforts, to show the nature of community
organizing patterns in relocated communities, and to assess the suitability of methods to women's
socioeconomic empowerment in relocated places. The empirical data collection was limited to
selected Tsunami-affected relocated areas in the Trincomalee, Batticaloa, and Ampara districts
of Sri Lanka, and the qualitative data was primarily collected through personal and group
interviews, and study of the case histories of the relocated women. The study could observe that,
women's voices were mainly ignored in recovery initiatives, and women in relocated areas were
unable to communicate their special interests in the design of reconstruction and rehabilitation
programs. In the emerging homogenous and heterogeneous social fabrics, asymmetric power
relations have developed among all types of stratified categories of individuals, effectively
marginalizing women; furthermore, the displacement resulted in the loss of impacted people's
conventional sources of income, and their new environs made it difficult for them to adapt new
livelihoods. The study finds that as a result of this predicament, women became more reliant on
their male household members, who appeared to be the only possible breadwinners in such
anomalous social contexts, and concludes that, women became increasingly vulnerable to
violence as a result of weak community organizing, laxity in social control, and fissure in
solidarity. The study emphasizes the need for post-disaster participatory development initiatives
in relocated settlements to adapt their approaches.
