Women living in emergency trailer parks in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina were three times more likely to become victims of domestic or sexual violence than they were prior to the storm, according to a new study published by the American Medical Association.

Dr. Lynn Lawry, the lead author of the report published Monday in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, said the level of violence found in the survey is comparable to similar studies performed in camps for displaced people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and other war-torn countries.

The study, conducted from 2006 to 2007, surveyed 420 women in Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer parks around the state. The per capita incidents of violence against women - both sexual and physical - is similar to what Lawry, who works on health and humanitarian issues for the Defense Department, found in camps in Darfur region of Sudan in 2005.

"When you have women in a displaced population in an internally displaced camp you are putting them at risk for violence, all forms of violence," she said. "This is not something that is unknown."

Anna Walker Crump, executive director of the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said the findings of the study are "tragic and alarming."

"That is just shocking to hear that kind of comparison," she said. "We need to pay attention to what is going on in our community."

She also said the report should serve as a call to arms that violence against women in the state is "epidemic" in scope.

"Domestic violence is a behavioral kind of issue, and it's a choice and abusers use circumstances as an excuse," she said.

The study measured the increase by using pre-storm domestic violence and sexual assault statistics as a baseline and compared those numbers to those reported by women in the trailer parks.

The resulting comparison found gender-based violence in Mississippi rose from 4.6 instances per day per 100,000 women before the storm to 16.3 instances in 2006. Levels declined in 2007 but remained at more than double the pre-storm rate.

The study is believed to be the first to document an increase in gender-based violence in a disaster area among displaced people.

Sandra Morrison, executive director of the Gulf Coast Women's Center For Non-Violence in Biloxi, said she did not experience such a dramatic increase in clients at the center's domestic violence shelter.

She did not see an increase in domestic violence reports following earlier hurricanes like Ivan in 2004 or Georges in 1998.

That could be because Katrina was a singular disaster and the number of displaced people was so great, she said.

"The people weren't here. People moved. The population left, and it took a month for them to come back," she said.

When the trailer parks organized, Morrison said it was clear there were problems. How great, no one knew, she said.

"People were in these trailer parks, and the calls to law enforcement were way way up. It wasn't always the victim calling. Often it was the neighbor," she said.

The stresses of the disaster, job losses and tight quarters, combined with an increased use of alcohol and drugs are believed to be the culprit, she said.

"I think the FEMA trailers really lent themselves to a lot of dynamics that resulted in violence and these one-time instances," she said.

FEMA organized the parks in response to the massive displacement of Gulf Coast residents following the Aug. 29, 2005 hurricane. The agency did not close the last of the parks, known as "emergency group sites," until earlier this year.

Lawry said the spike in violence against women went largely unnoticed, in part, because officials did not view the crisis in a global context. Rather than storm victims, Lawry said Mississippians affected by the storm were "internally displaced" and housed in camps similar to the way people of other countries are displaced as the result of war or famine.

Such internally displaced populations follow patterns, including a tendency toward violence against women, she said.

"We were thinking in a U.S. context. We weren't calling them internally displaced and thinking of them in an internally displaced context," she said. "Whether it is in the U.S. or Darfur or Afghanistan, you are going to see violence against women."

Yet Lawry said there is much more U.S. media interest in the results of a recent World Health Organization study on the mental health of Iraqis than on what is happening here.

"I think it falls on Mississippi to follow up on its residents," she said. "It needs a concerted effort from the domestic violence groups as well as primary care providers to make sure these women get the care that they need."

Lawry also said the information in the study could help policy makers better plan for the next natural disaster.