Domestic Violence and COVID-19: the Silent Crisis
In a year fraught with crisis after crisis, there is still another social problem which demands more awareness — and you probably haven’t thought of it.
I. COVID-19 and the News Cycle
2020 has been a total mess of a year. It can be hard to keep up with it as the news cycle moves at warp speed.
Nevertheless, COVID-19 has dominated much of that cycle: death rates; infection rates; hopefully, a vaccine; lockdowns; “flattening the curve”; the unemployment crisis. You’ve also likely heard of the more tertiary crises fueled by the Pandemic, like the eviction crisis and the potential explosion of homelessness. Indeed, the virus has thrown a wrench into everything.
There is yet another social problem thrust into starker relief because of the lockdowns, and you probably haven’t thought much about it — that’s perfectly understandable, as there has been little national coverage of it and very sporadic local coverage across the country.
That problem is domestic violence.
II. Domestic Violence Pre-Lockdown
According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the CDC, an average of twenty people per minute (most are women aged eighteen to twenty-four) are abused by a spouse or intimate partner. That equates to nearly ten million men and women per year and more than 20,000 calls to domestic violence hotlines every single day.
Breaking these numbers down further, we see one in three women and one in four men being subjected to some form of physical violence (shoves, slaps, punches, etc.). One in seven women and one in twenty-five men are injured by a partner and one in ten women being the victim of a rape or sexual assault by a partner.
Data on that last metric for male victims — as is the case with sex crimes perpetuated against them by someone who is not a partner — is extremely difficult to come by, let alone verify. The estimation is one in seventy-one men and one in five women will be raped in their lifetimes. Survivors of any gender very often don’t report being a victim because of social stigma and the mistaken notion that when it is domestic in origin it is purely an individual and family…
