Under Water

LISTENING: to my cat cry at my door
FEELING: overwhelmed with gratitude and anger
SEEING: the fall sun shine outside

TW: Today's newsletter discusses domestic violence and femicide.

Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene roared into the Southeast, Americans are bracing for yet another ferocious storm: Hurricane Milton. By the time you all read this, the storm is likely to have made landfall. I'm writing this ahead of its arrival.

There are several groups of people I think about whenever a horrific fossil fuel-powered: incarcerated people, immigrants (especially undocumented ones), Indigenous communities, people who live in mobile homes. These days, I'm thinking a lot about the women who are living in unsafe conditions: the women with exes who won't leave them alone, the women who share children with psychos who don't understand that they're over, the women who are too afraid to leave abusive partners.

There's not enough research on this topic, but there's enough to know that when a hurricane hits, women become much more vulnerable to abuse and, yes, death.

Welcome to Possibilities, a creative climate newsletter on the possibilities that lie where crisis meets community. I’m Yessenia Funes, and I'm getting really personal today.

In 2018, I wrote about domestic violence post-Hurricane Michael. This wasn't a unique phenomenon. This is a pattern that's been documented following Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita, Hurricane Harvey, and Hurricane Maria. This is global, even. We see this in countries beyond the U.S. — like Bangladesh.

“Weather events like these and disasters, in general, are opportunities for abusers — both domestic violence attackers and sexual assault perpetrators — to take advantage of the restrictive access survivors have to resources and to also take advantage of the isolation in the aftermath survivors experience,” Meg Baldwin told me back in 2018. At the time, she was executive director of Refuge House, a safe center for victims and survivors. “That isolation becomes even more intense and is even more of an opportunity for attackers to harm others.”

Surge in Domestic Violence Feared in Wake of Hurricane Michael

As Hurricane Michael whirled toward Florida over a week ago, Meg Baldwin went into overdrive. As executive director of Refuge House, which works to end

GizmodoYessenia Funes

This has been heavy on my mind because my own family just experienced a tragedy involving femicide. It's a long painful story that feels a bit inappropriate to get into detail here in my newsletter, but we're now fundraising for the burial and repatriation of Brenda Guadalupe Alfaro, the 29-year-old mother whom our cousin brutally murdered. Yes, my cousin.

I didn't know him very well, but I don't stand by him or what he's done for one second. It's been disheartening to see random people on the internet point to my awful cousin, who is an immigrant, and determine that all immigrants must be bloodthirsty killers. This isn't new rhetoric, but it's alarming. Immigrants are always the scapegoat. We're seeing that live as the right-wing (particularly Donald fucking Trump) believes immigrants are to blame for a lack of federal funds to help disaster victims.

That's a whole other rant of mine, but I want to make this clear. My cousin is a monster — but that's not because he is an immigrant. Immigrants are more than the worst of us. The same goes for any other group of people. Obviously! This should go without being said.

Wanna know who else was an immigrant? Brenda, my cousin's ex, the mother of a 2-year-old child who is now left without his mom. My heart is with her and with this sweet boy I've known since he was a few months old — the sweetest little love who keeps asking for his mom and kissing pictures of her, confused as to why she hasn't yet arrived to take him home.

Our GoFundMe has more details, so please read and donate and share if you're able. Please tag me if you do share. It means the world. If we surpass our goal, that means more funds to ensure the baby has a future and that my dear cousin, who's fostering him as she has before, has what she needs to keep him safe.

Across the country and globe, too many women's voices go unheard. Too many tragedies happen under the guise of a storm. In Georgia, Hurricane Helene left shelters "damaged and some inoperable," according to an Instagram post from the Georgia Coalition for Domestic Violence. They're also accepting donations here.

October marks Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Women and their children all too often bear the deadly cost of a man's emotional immaturity, rage, and violence. My heart is with the families who can't find an escape as the eye of the storm approaches. 🌀

Rest in Power

While we can't say for certain that climate change led to these specific weather events (we need attribution studies for that), we do know that the Earth's rising temperatures are already creating more disasters like these.