UK Urged to Get Ready for Disaster with New National Crises Plan – but Our Research Reveals the Dark Side of Prepping

Domestic and emotional issues fall squarely on mothers who are tasked with keeping households running, no matter the circumstances. Whether ensuring everyone eats during shortages or soothing worries when the lights go out, women carry an outsized caretaking burden pivotal to family survival. All while navigating their own stresses and anxieties.

Recommendations around resilience underestimate the invisible and emotional labour needed to implement contingency planning, scanning the horizon for the next crisis. Rather than empowering households, the push toward self-sufficient readiness fuels deeper anxiety around loved ones’ safety. And if disaster strikes, support beyond immediate family remains essential.

Despite the resilience framework promoting a whole of society approach, preparedness inevitably develops into a scenario of haves and have-nots (meaning, those with the spare cash, space and time to prepare, and those who do not). This lays the foundations for inequality, resentment and the erosion of communal ties.

Our research on Brexit-prepping mothers highlights the stigma that they directed towards the unprepared (who they vilified as lazy and feckless for failing to shield children from risk). What resulted was families taking individual action to preserve their own resilience, which we believe has two implications for the resilience framework.

First, focus on individual resilience risks fueling an “everyone for themselves” mentality. The prepared will put their own families’ needs above others. In our research with Brexit preppers, envisaged disruption led mothers to anticipate difficult decisions surrounding who they would and would not offer help should disaster strike.

In our research study ordinary, upstanding community members (such as teachers and parish councilors) imagined allowing children of the unprepared to go hungry, or considered exploiting others’ unpreparedness on the black market (selling surplus food and supplies at extortionate prices).

Pushed to the edge, they fortified their homes and armed themselves to fend off potential looters who lacked the foresight to prep. Anna, for example, discussed using her archery skills to fend off possible looters: “I’m actually an archer, so I have a bow and arrow in the garage. And I’m a bloody good shot, I’m not kidding. I’d need to protect the family.”

Second, the ability to be “prepared” risks becoming tightly bound up with dominant norms of privilege and “good”, middle-class motherhood. These are the mothers mostly likely to possess the wealth, time, skills and physical space to prep.

Those Left Out
Conversely, the less privileged, such as those experiencing housing issues and precarious employment, who often live hand to mouth, will be less able to prepare. Their survival is likely focused on the everyday, rather than planning for a possible eventuality. Inevitably, they will need wider support from the community, which the resilience framework, given its individualized approach to risk, does not fully consider.

While secrecy around prepping aims to safeguard accumulated assets from prospective thieves, it also isolates at-risk groups who lack equal means to stockpile for themselves. What duty do neighbors have to share with others if catastrophe (or even a temporary glitch) occurs? The line between rational self interest and morality blurs when survival instincts kick in, yet interconnected resilience may suffer when social cohesion frays beyond repair.

The government may encourage readiness across the whole of society, but this rings hollow if resilience is pursued through the stigma and separation of haves versus have-nots. Promoting preparedness without addressing inequalities, communal ties, emotional resilience and the gendered nature of caretaking labor undermines social cohesion critical for weathering crises.

Real security arises not from isolated stockpiles and individual action, but the establishment of more community-wide plans for preparedness in the event of disaster.

Ben Kerrane is Professor of Marketing, School of Busines, Manchester Metropolitan University. David Rowe is Lecturer in Marketing, University of York. Katy Kerrane is Lecturer in Marketing, University of Liverpool. Shona Bettany is Professor of Marketing, School of Business, Education and Law, University of Huddersfield. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.