“Every night rape at the shelter” The ugly face of the Great East Japan Earthquake Shelter

Input 2021.03.12 12:30

During the Great East Japan Earthquake 10 years ago, testimonies from victims of sexual assault were raised in refugee shelters.

On the 11th, Japan’s NHK aired a documentary titled’Buried voices’ in the 10th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake. This documentary deals with the victims of sexual assault by women who lived in three prefectures, including Fukushima and Iwate Miyagi, which were the most severely affected by the earthquake.

On March 11, 2011, around 2:46 pm, a huge earthquake of magnitude 9.0 occurred in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Sanriku, Japan. Residents of the affected area, who became refugees in an instant, took refuge in shelters. However, there were no partitions in the shelter, and it was all that blankets were laid in the huge auditorium.

The problem is that in shelters, sexual assaults against refugees occurred regularly. According to NHK, a woman who had lost her husband in the earthquake was forced to have sex by the shelter commander. He stated, “The shelter commander will give him a towel or food, so he explicitly forced him to have sex at night, asking him to come to him at night.”

A woman who was in her twenties at the time said, “At night, men in shelters came into the blanket where the woman was lying, and caught the woman and took her to a dark place to remove her clothes.” Nevertheless, the people around him said, “I can’t help it because I’m young,” rather than helping them.

Another woman confessed, saying, “I was afraid that I would be killed after telling about this fact. Even if I was killed, I couldn’t tell the surroundings because I was thrown into the sea and would be blamed for a tsunami.” As such, the women in the shelter explained that countless terrible crimes occurred in the shelter.

According to data released in February of last year by the “Companion Hotline,” a counseling line exclusively for Japan, 50% of counseling received in three prefectures affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake as a result of analyzing 360,000 counseling contents received between 2013 and 2018. The above was related to sexual violence. In particular, it is said that about 40% of the victims were young women in their teens and twenties.

Secretary-General Tomoko Endo said, “Whenever a disaster occurs, there are many women who are suffering from anxiety and fear and suffering from insomnia because they see the news and information and come to mind. We must strive to eradicate it,” he stressed.