Safety, security, crisis
management are typically and for historical reasons managed by men.
This leads the attention mostly on organizational and technical factors.
Slowly is emerged, both in the literature and in the field experience,
that human resources - rescuers and victims - are at the heart of
the functioning and efficiency before, during and after emergencies.
Therefore, until fairly recently, studies for agencies and civil protection
corps began to introduce and evaluate this side of the crisis management
and emergencies. A step ahead analyzing men and human behavior and
reactions, was the perspective introduced successfully in the Pre
emergencies project. (1) (2)
A collection of case studies (3) was developed to gain an in-depth
understanding of practices that lead to positive outcomes in an emergency
and to test their applicability in other contexts. The attention was
focused on human behavior, organizational, coordinative, chain-of-command
elements, which then were evaluated in relation to a scale of efficiently
response type.
We clearly demonstrate that a gender approach in research brings,
a holistic and more appropriate way of knowledge.
During RED project (4) we are focusing the attention on human behavior
in emergencies, considering the high price in psychological burden
sense rescuers pay each time they live an intervention. This time
we start our considerations about gender from some studies that indicate
that psychological effects are not only stronger among females, but
more lasting as well.
We are working for gathering new elements through a widespread questionnaire
that have to assess individual emergency workers' well-being with
reference to the quality of their lives in general, but mostly, to
their working lives.
Both the projects are an efficacy example where the project engineering
and coordination is by a woman and the direction and group of search
consequently includes women specialists (engineer, psychologists,
etc...).
