BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, March 26, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Women in Indonesia's Aceh province are bearing the brunt of the killer tsunami with a fourfold death toll and sexual abuse in relief camps, a leading international aid group said in a report published on Saturday, March 26.

“We are already hearing about rapes, harassment and forced early marriages,” Becky Buell, Oxfam's policy director, said in the report, which was carried by Reuters.

Women's activists in Aceh said most camps for tsunami survivors did not have facilities segregated by sex, and men and women from different families often slept in the same tent.

“Many female survivors who lost their male relatives also sleep in these tents and they do not have protection. Rapes then happen and after that the women are put into some sort of exile so that people won't talk,” said Wanti Maulidar, head of Women's Solidarity of Aceh.

“There were cases of rape by men from out of the camps against the female settlers, but when we asked the community elders, they said the men and women performed sexual acts on the basis of mutual consent,” Maulidar added.

Mia Emsa, the head of the Aceh Gender Transformation Working Group, said that harassments against women usually come about when they have to go to the bathrooms.

“In a camp that has bathrooms for women, there are peep holes used by the men,” she said.

Oxfam, which surveyed eight villages in two districts of Aceh for this report, also cited similar findings in India and Sri Lanka.

Saturday marked three months since the disaster, which killed an estimated 182,000 people around the Indian Ocean with a further 106,000 reported missing.

Aid pledges from around the world have topped $5 billion.

Oxfam said that the monster tidal waves had killed up to four times as many women as men.

It noted that in four villages in North Aceh District, out of 366 deaths, 284 were females.

“In some villages it now appears that up to 80 percent of those killed were women. This disproportionate impact will lead to problems for years to come,” Buell said in the report.

The report suggested that women were less able to survive because they had to take care of their children during the ordeal, and in some cases lacked swimming and climbing skills.

Oxfam said the gender imbalance needed to be factored into reconstruction, as women feared they would face more work to look after extended family and pressure to have more children.

“The threat is that due to the shortage of women, they are going to have to marry younger and younger,” Ines Smith, an Oxfam gender adviser, told the British newspaper The Guardian.

“This means loss of education, pregnancy at a younger age and more pregnancies,” added Smith, who did much of the research in Aceh.