Keywords

Introduction

In October 2022, a report published in Australia, entitled Fault Lines, presented the findings of a substantial independent inquiry into Australia’s response to COVID-19 (Shergold et al., 2022). The Report identifies four areas where, in the view of the authors, Australia ‘should have done better’ (Shergold et al., 2022, p. 6) in its response to the pandemic. These four areas covered the provision of fair and equitable economic supports, fewer lockdowns and border closures, keeping schools open and protecting older Australians (Shergold et al., 2022). The 100-page report is among the first of many that will undoubtedly follow in the coming years, designed to scrutinise the pandemic-era actions of countries around the world. Notably, among the 100 pages ‘gender’ is mentioned once (Shergold et al., 2022, p. 53). One sentence recognises that policies introduced during the pandemic ‘could have contributed to approaches that worsened mental health, increased anxiety and triggered family violence’ (Shergold et al., 2022, p. 53). This is supported by a single paragraph later in the report which acknowledges that, for some, the COVID-19 pandemic represents a story of ‘more domestic violence’ and the many structural factors that further increased this risk. Here, the report states:

For others, COVID-19 will be a story of trauma, isolation and terrifying uncertainty. It will be a story of being locked in overcrowded housing, job loss and missing out on government supports. It will be a story of more domestic violence, increased alcohol abuse, and deteriorating mental and physical health. (Shergold et al., 2022, p. 79)

In contrast, throughout the pages of this book many aspects of the ‘domestic violence story’ of the COVID-19 pandemic have been told through the presentation of a series of case studies as well as the extensive body of research that is now available. The authors of this book have focused on specific contexts and locations but within this, global questions have also been raised. Unlike the report referenced above—as well as the many policy briefings, public announcements and speeches which predated it—the analysis presented here has centred on gender and vulnerability, bringing to the fore the gendered impacts of political and policy decision-making during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through an exploration of different political and policy responses to COVID-19, and the varied and ongoing impacts of the pandemic, this book has sought to highlight the impacts the COVID-19 pandemic had—and continues to have—on violence against women and children, and the lessons that might be learnt for policy makers moving forward. The book has not sought to present a country-specific analysis (though the significant tilt towards Australian and UK case studies throughout is acknowledged by the authors), but rather to demonstrate that women and children’s safety and their experiences of violence during the pandemic have been shared in similar ways across the globe. While many around the world quickly came to adopt the nomenclature ‘shadow pandemic’, as first characterised by the UN (UN Women, 2020), in the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, responses which considered and centred the safety of women experiencing DFV were seemingly few and far between. This final chapter examines what lessons, if any, can be taken from adaptations to service delivery and other responses that were made during the pandemic, for future crisis management and policy responses.

The Unfolding Pandemic

Much of the analysis offered in this book draws on material which focuses on the nature and extent of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 running through to the end of 2022. The end of 2022 was the point at which many countries moved into the next phase of the pandemic. In this phase, public health policies largely abandoned the frequent use of stay-at-home orders and social movement restrictions shifted towards strategies focused on vaccination and economic recovery. With this in mind, this book is careful to not imply that the pandemic is over. Rather, it is important to note that while case numbers continue to ebb and flow internationally, the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are still unfolding. In many ways, these consequences are yet to be fully realised—particularly economically—and the concomitant impact of these consequences will continue to be felt in relation to women’s safety.

In order to make sense of the complex ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic can impact on a wide range of aspects of women’s lives, it is useful to return to Peterman et al.’s (2020) nine pathways, which highlight the different ways in which the pandemic may have a direct or indirect impact on violence against women and girls. These pathways were outlined in the introduction to this book, though they are worth repeating:

  1. 1.

    economic insecurity and poverty-related stress,

  2. 2.

    quarantines and social isolation,

  3. 3.

    disaster and conflict-related unrest and instability,

  4. 4.

    exposure to exploitative relationships due to changing demographics,

  5. 5.

    reduced health service availability and access to first responders,

  6. 6.

    inability of women to temporarily escape abusive partners,

  7. 7.

    virus-specific sources of violence,

  8. 8.

    exposure to violence and coercion in response efforts, and

  9. 9.

    violence perpetrated against health care workers. (Peterman et al., 2020, p. 5)

While it has not been the intention of this book to interrogate each and every one of these pathways, the material contained throughout demonstrates many of the direct and indirect impacts that Peterman et al. (2020) drew attention to. For example, UN Women (2021) offer a wide-ranging statistical review of the economic and poverty-related stresses experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, Abraham et al. (2022) report that in India:

Conditional on being in the workforce prior to the pandemic, women were seven times more likely to lose work during the nationwide lockdown, and conditional on losing work, eleven times more likely to not return to work subsequently, compared to men. (Abraham et al., 2022, p. 101)

These are just two among a wealth of studies documenting the consequences beyond ill health of COVID-19, and the impact of policy responses to it on women. Moreover, this analysis demonstrates that impacts such as these are intimately connected with the nature and extent of the violence(s) experienced by women in times of crisis more generally (see Chapter 2). Thus, the gendered nature of the impact of COVID-19 and related public health measures cannot be overlooked. In particular, this analysis draws attention to the existence and impacts of pathways one, two, three, five and six (see Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 6).

The authors of this book are also mindful that, since the onset of the pandemic, many other natural disasters have impacted nations across the globe. This brings to mind the importance of considering our analysis of how women and children’s safety is impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the policy responses within the broader context of disasters that are increasingly a feature of a world impacted by climate change. Peterman et al.’s (2020) framework, while originally written with the pandemic in mind, provides an important way of thinking about the wide range of ways in which disasters of all kinds can have gendered consequences. To this end—as much of the material presented in this book points to—these consequences serve as a warning that when the gendered impacts of public policy during disaster are not given due consideration, the impacts on women’s economic security and personal safety are significant with further ongoing consequences for societal and economic recovery. Whether through policy decisions relating to stay-at-home orders, work-from-home recommendations, school closures, changes to the migration system or access to protection via the justice system, the failure—in many countries—to adequately consider women’s economic security and personal safety at each point of the COVID-19 pandemic must serve as an example for political leaders who encounter times of disaster in years to come. Importantly, however, this is not solely an issue for attention during disasters. As Parry and Gordon (2021) comment of South Africa:

It is of the utmost importance that we address IPV, not only as the shadow pandemic of increasing violence against women during COVID‐19, but as the overwhelming and devastating pandemic it is for the women in South African society, day after day, hour after hour. (Parry & Gordon, 2021, p. 804)

The high prevalence rate of domestic violence globally (WHO, 2021) highlights the importance for all countries of this statement. Much of what became more visible during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic had already been widely documented during other times of crisis and disasters, as discussed in Chapter 2. The intriguing elephant-in-the-room question is: why, if all this was known, was it not taken account of in policy responses?

Nevertheless, regardless of what was already known or what this implies for disasters to come, Peterman et al.’s (2020) first pathway of economic insecurity and poverty-related stress has well and truly taken hold globally as the cost-of-living crisis and the resultant impacts on family stresses have emerged centre stage three years into the pandemic. Again, a failure to acknowledge the gendered impact of this economic crisis represents a political unwillingness to take women’s economic and personal safety seriously. As stated by Nazeer and Sharp-Jeffs (2022):

We’re all worried about the cost of living crisis. From interest rates to groceries, utility bills to petrol, everything is getting more expensive. But for some women, this crisis could mean the difference between life and death. Lack of economic safety forces women to stay with abusers longer than they want to, meaning they experience more harm as a result. For those that leave, economic abuse can long continue, preventing women from rebuilding their lives, sometimes for decades. (Nazeer & Sharp-Jeffs, 2022, p. 1)

A survey undertaken in England and Wales by Women’s Aid found that 66% of victim-survivors reported that their abuser was using the increase in the cost-of-living as a tool for coercive control, while 50% of victim-survivors noted that the increase in the cost of living was a barrier to leaving their abuser by fear of not being able to financially support children (Nazeer & Sharp-Jeffs, 2022). As revealed in Chapter 2, it is not uncommon for perpetrators to utilise wider circumstances to evolve their tactics of coercion and control. This analysis, undertaken in England and Wales, shows why governments must not interpret the move away from stay-at-home restrictions as meaning that women and children experiencing family violence now enjoy a freedom to leave abusive homes. The act of leaving is, of course, a well-known trigger for violence escalation and intimate partner homicide (see inter alia Dekeseredy et al., 2017). The increasingly trying nature of the economic circumstances within which lives are being lived operates as a new barrier (for some) to help-seeking, and one which policy makers globally must seek to address. That such economic circumstances predictably take their toll on those economically deprived across all societies—and their links with stress, violence and poorer life expectancy—should place women and children at the centre of such concerns (see also the edited collection by Fassin & Fourcade, 2021, discussed in Chapter 1). At this juncture, the elephant in the room becomes a mammoth.

Absent Present Policy

The gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic can be spoken about as universally present. However, while recognising that in many cases the pandemic compounded structural inequities, the analysis presented in this book reveals a tale of two stories, where public health and other policy responses are subjected to closer scrutiny. On the one hand, there were reactive responses, particularly in the early days of the pandemic, where there was little to no consideration given to the safety needs and impacts of women and children experiencing violence. Such reactions saw mass closures of schools and the overnight introduction of stay-at-home restrictions, including curfews, variously enacted in different geographical locations for different periods of time. These responses were sold on the promise of responding to health advice and in the absence of any guidebook for managing a global pandemic. Much of this policy making necessitated a trial-and-error approach. In some countries, this reactive policy approach was very quickly challenged by those voices aware of the consequence that stay-at-home/shelter-in-place directives might have on the nature and extent of violence(s) in women’s and children’s lives. In response to such voices, some jurisdictions quickly provided extra funding support for service providers (see Chapter 2). However, there is a second strand to this story, which speaks to the ongoing absences in policy responses to violence against women. Importantly, these two stories are not separate or separable. They are intertwined. In any one jurisdiction they can exist side-by-side, making the absent present in such policy responses ever more telling.

To be specific—and by way of illustration—it is of value to return to one of the themes addressed in this book: the turn to digital justice and other service responses using the digital world as a means for service delivery. Such policy response options existed in their embryonic form in a wide range of jurisdictions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (see, in particular, Chapter 7, and the concomitant implications in the use of these mechanisms in working from home for support workers as documented in Chapter 6). This turn to the digital assumes a jurisdictional infrastructure both intra-organisational, across organisational and societal (rural and urban), in which participants are equipped with the skills and resources to enable their participation. The assumptions made here about where, when and who has access to services and support delivered in this way are profound. The absence of clear thinking around the consequences of this policy turn for those marginalised (economically, physically, linguistically, due to homelessness and so on) speaks volumes about who and what the target of such policies are. Elsewhere, Jones (2022) has developed the concept of bureaucratic violence as one way of making sense of the gap between policy promise and its delivery in violence against women in Indonesia. The absent presence of such violence runs deep from the failure to provide appropriately funded alternative housing policies for women wishing to leave abusive relationships to the capacity of different organisations to occupy different planets (Hester, 2011) in their responses to women and children (on the experiences of Indigenous women, also see Stubbs & Wangmann, 2015).

Regardless of the policy emphasis adopted, the pandemic has exposed the historic failure to meaningfully invest in the kind of system infrastructure needed to ensure women’s safety. In many jurisdictions, specialist services were required to step in and fill the gap where governments had not built whole-of-system responses to violence against women. For example, as referred to above, the lack of accessible housing options in many countries (see also EIGE, 2021) was apparent in early 2020 even as governments around the world moved to impose ‘stay home, stay safe’ policies. This failed to consider that for a significant portion of every community, home is not a safe place (see inter alia Summers, 2022). Further, the long-term lack of investment in child-centred services for children and young people experiencing family violence was also apparent as children around the world headed home for long periods of time during COVID-19-related school closures, alongside the absence of a service system skilled to address their safety and support needs.

The reliance on the women’s safety sector, made up of women supporting women, is not new in the context of disaster. This is a persistent reality of an infrastructure that, in many places globally, is at best piecemeal and largely reactively focused on victims rather than overarching efforts to identify the deep connections between gender inequality that is sustained by many aspects of social and economic policy. Rather than interrogating what sustains violence, policy responses instead emerge to deal with its aftermath alongside some additional piecemeal funding. This calls to mind the question of how to push beyond and becomes more of a question of how to call nations to account for the conditions that sustain gendered violence.

As detailed throughout this book, this absent policy response has resulted in a lack of a service infrastructure/workforce not prepared for a pandemic—meaning significant pressures were placed upon those specialist practitioners working within systems that were largely disconnected and already overstretched, and heavily reliant on women and primary carers. As the analyses in Chapters 5 and 6 reveal, the women’s safety sector undertook significant transformations during the pandemic to ensure the continued delivering of support to women experiencing domestic violence, even where face-to-face provisions, safety planning and risk assessment were not possible. Thus, this pivot has come at a cost—one that is yet to be fully realised.

Concluding Thoughts: The Ongoing Impacts of Global Uncertainty

Building on the earlier discussion of the cost-of-living crisis, this book acknowledges that at the time of writing (2022) the public’s attention on the COVID-19 pandemic has in many ways been overshadowed by other global issues. It is a time of significant global uncertainty and change. To this end, while the COVID-19 pandemic represented a ‘moment in time focus’ throughout 2020 and 2021, the laser-eyed attention of the world has shifted to the war in Ukraine, the fight for women’s rights in Iran, the political turmoil in the UK, the winding back of women’s reproductive rights in the US—the list goes on. Nevertheless, it is essential to recognise that the ongoing impacts of the pandemic are continuing to have a ripple effect on women’s safety and can compound the capacity of individuals and communities to recover.

In this shift to recovery from the pandemic, Carlien Scheele, Director of the EIGE, in a press release issued on International Women’s Day, 2021, had this to say:

Europe will bounce back, as long as gender equality is front and centre of recovery measures. In a small win for gender equality, Member States will have to show how their economic recovery plans promote gender equality in order to access the EU’s recovery fund. EIGE can help with that by providing gender statistics, which are crucial to understand the different effects of the pandemic on women and men and assess where the money is most needed. (Scheele, 2021)

This statement reveals a clue into how to manage and move on from this time of global uncertainty: data. One call to action implied in the pages of this book is the availability of data, appropriately disaggregated and collated in order to document the wider impacts of contemporary precarity. Without data, making progress in relation to gender—and all other inequalities—will forever be absent in policy. However, data on its own does not generate change. Having an appropriately co-ordinated and integrated policy framework might. Much has been made, especially in Europe, of the importance of the Istanbul Convention (2011) and its four pillars of action in relation to violence against women and children: prevention, protection, prosecution and integration. This convention is sometimes referred to as a ‘gold standard’ for action. Such claims notwithstanding, 10 years on this convention has been denounced by Turkey and not yet fully ratified by the EU—a timely reminder that making change is an ongoing enterprise. Speaking at the European Gender Equality Forum on 24 October 2022, the UN Special Rapporteur, Reem Alsalem, called for action plans, resources, implementation plans and coordination in order to move forward on combatting violence(s) against women and children. Much of this is, of course, not new. However, it may be that the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel might, as one critic has pointed out, result in a recognition for ‘creativity on many fronts, not least by creating a synergy between feminist theory, evidence gathering, and practice. Together these could add up to much more than the sum of their individual trajectories’ (Agarwal, 2021 p. 252). It could even, perhaps, lead to a wider acknowledgement of what Mooi-Reci and Risman (2021) call ‘cultural logics’. As they point out in introducing a special issue of the journal Gender and Society:

Most women in opposite-sex couples in most of the world took on more of the extra domestic work and child care during the pandemic. No law required them to do so. No social policy incentivized such behavior. Such is the power of cultural logics that presume women are responsible for caretaking work. But the cross-cultural differences in these studies also suggest that material conditions, government policies such as school opening, and financial support for workers decreased women’s burdens. (Mooi-Reci & Risman, 2021, p. 166)

Policies can, and do, make a difference. There is more work to be done.