What made Domestic Violence Different during the Pandemic?

     Domestic violence. What did you think about when reading those two strong words? You probably thought about a man hitting a woman at home, but domestic violence goes beyond physical fights. As explained by Holmström R., abuse can be easily inflicted by punches taking the form of words, manipulation, gaslighting and other controlling actions that most of the time go unnoticed behind closed doors (2021). When nobody can see or judge their behavior, perpetrators decide to destroy the victim’s self-esteem, their courage and their own ideas with insults and depraved words you’d never expect to hear from a loved one. Love becomes fear and home becomes a prison. It is mostly at home with your romantic partner where this verbal and emotional abuse takes place, but it also occurs in the home of your mental stability: your brain. It is no question, then, that most victims of domestic violence suffer in great majority mental health repercussions upon their behavior and selves, a wound they’ll carry for a lifetime. Mental distress is in fact a long-term effect that can’t be cured easily and was particularly severe for the women all around the planet who have experienced such situations during the global pandemic of COVID-19. It is a virus that affected the health system, but also the routines of those women who were restricted to stay home. Lockdowns were imposed along with quarantines and limitations for public places. The only places you went were groceries and then you returned in a blink of an eye under the same roof where you were in yesterday. Victims of domestic violence had to see their perpetrator everyday for months with no escape. Some decided to flee, others not, and in the meantime changes occurred all around the world with perpetrators taking their abuse to new levels while victims suffered their worst period of mental health.

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     Mental health and regular medicine have a lot in common, for example hospitals and doctors who were obsolete during the pandemic. Those facilities and other important available services that constantly provide help and support for IPV (Intimate Partner Violence) victims were disrupted by the flood of critical patients having contracted the new virus, while other services were totally closed. As reported by Lyons M. & Brewer G., victims openly told them the frustrations felt when their perpetrators couldn’t attend therapy anymore, got an early-release from prison because of positive testings, when even their own individual therapy sessions got permanently canceled, or when court had to delay prosecutions for several months (2021, pgs 6, 8). Those unthinkable situations are just some examples of how the pandemic made it harder for the victims to get help from the world outside their front doors, especially when hospitals along with shelters are both the top providers of support for DV (Domestic Violence) situations. However both types of facilities were already giving their best support to grave COVID-19 patients, and there was no space left for wounded women because the system was unprepared.

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     Victims were also unprepared for the pandemic and most of their preparations to leave and finally get a new life were either interrupted or completely destroyed before their eyes. The pandemic caused an economical crisis all around the world along with causing all services, as said before, to become rather pointless and immeasurably slow. While waiting for those services, victims had to experience great emotional turmoil for months during the lockdown seeing how all the open doors they created for themselves were shutting down one after another. Referring on the forums on Reddit by Lyons M, & Brewer G., many women described the anxiety and paranoia of thoughts they had while still waiting for their last payment to leave the house, how their bags were already packed, a new house was on the way to be bought and it all come down with an eternal wait to get out and face the sun (2021, pg 4). In those desperate and trapped situations many tried to create new elaborate escape plans similar or better than the ones before, all while devoured by the fear of being found out and escalating things quickly. This was the case for women who started to experience more aggressive abuse, one they couldn’t take anymore within the walls of their home and that forced them to desperately seek help. Help was mostly provided by calls to national hotline services around the world that had a never stopping income of begs for help, or by specialized social media pages receiving multiple alarming texts. The increase was so big that according to the statistics from Stoianova T. et al., domestic violence reports from 2019 to 2020 went up by 300% in China, 700% in Spain and 225% in Colombia (2020, pgs.10, 11). This increase doesn’t necessarily mean that more women were starting to get abused during the pandemic, but leads to the more plausible conclusion that the numbers of victims stayed the same while the level of abuse aggression increased. For example, verbal abuse developed into corporal abuse and the lack of physical services along with more isolation made it so for victims to reach their breaking point and call.

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     Bravely escaping was the choice of most but not the choice of all, some couldn’t escape at all deciding to stay trapped in four walls and live abuse as a habit. Daily abuse is something many people can’t get their head around knowing they wouldn’t be able to endure it for one day, but sufferers can because they have coping mechanisms. As the specialist Holmström R. says, before the pandemic it was much easier for women to bear abuse as they could easily recur to social life, job or school immersion and other helpful hobbies to alleviate their pain (2021). However, distressors were made unavailable or innocents started to newly experience abuse and did not know at all how to deal with it or even how to recognize to be a victim of it, all leading to increasing stress and mental instability. The realization and support was hard to obtain at home isolated from family and friends, and just like most people during the pandemic, those women decided to spend almost all day on social media. Social media was great for some as, like Reddit mentioned before, it provided new ways of venting, help and coping, but it was also very harmful for those who had not the courage to speak up or could not at all. Many women had social media restrictions from their toxic partner, others instead were highly affected by their mental health decline to even care about help. This feeling of being trapped leads many into social media addiction. With respect to this and Sediri S. et al, the app with most engagements from victims was Facebook and among them about 40% suffered its addiction with positive correlation between DASS (Depression Anxiety Stress Scales) scores (2020, pg.3). The focus about the correlation isn’t whether DAAS were caused or causing social media addiction and vice versa, but instead the fact that the experience of those women were abnormal and psychologically destroying when compared to the normal lockdown effects on the general population.

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     It is known that both a pandemic and domestic violence can have severe mental effects on people, but when it comes to the latest the mental health effects are much more specific and severe. But what is mental health in the first place? Generally speaking it can be described as a state of productivity where one can deal with stressors without necessarily breaking down, and in the specifics regarding DV the mental effects are the same internationally, including in China where depression is prevalent from 65.8 to 75.8% which goes for about most countries (Su Z. et al., 2021, pg.2). It appears therefore that the question of why such abuse seemed to increase globally was because it affects psychologically in a concise way its victims regardless of country, making it so that the person becomes more sensitive and easier to shatter mentally. Outside factors that can break mental health can be political such as the state of your country which may be a prerequisite for abuse to happen based on preparedness of the authorities and laws. In light of the international study of Stoianova, T. et al., countries with already existing economical struggles like Colombia were completely unprepared for the increase of calls during the pandemic so much that 590 police stations didn’t even have Internet connection or phones to receive IPV calls or medicine to cure victims (2020, pg.11). Colombia is one of many other unprivileged countries around the world that had to go through that struggle showing that unprivilege and obstacles are the key for power-abuse relationships. In situations of violence where the fundamental dynamic is having only one person in power between two, it is no surprise that the one in disadvantage has the most negative mental health outcomes. Outcomes are shown in different psychological disorders such as social media addiction we talked about earlier, but it mostly deals with disorders involving DASS which was briefly nominated. It is revealed by the statistics from the scientific research of Sediri, S. et al., that among female victims of abuse 57.3% have severe anxiety and depression, 53.1% have extreme stress symptoms, all of which are particular to PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) (2020, pg.4). Comparing domestic violence to a war that usually causes PTSD therefore comes natural to the mind as it is shown to affect victims in a brutal way that creates long-term trauma and effects on daily behavior such as fear of being attacked for a simple error or shaking when triggers are in action.

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     Triggers are easily created when it comes to DV and can be very subtle, but they are particularly dangerous when generated with the new forms of abuse that marked the pandemic. As shown before, the abuse could change in different forms and escalate quickly in isolation but this was especially because of new forms of abuse that emerged from the offenders’ mind. Knowing the pandemic was causing a deep economical crisis with great unemployment and higher prices, abusers decided to lean on economical abuse instead of punches. As claimed by Sediri S. et al., only in Tunisia 96% of women experienced psychological abuse, usually not reported, followed by 41% economical abuse and only 10% was physical abuse that led them to higher forms of general anxiety disorders (2020, pg.4). It is obvious that the offenders take into consideration the environment they are in to choose the form of abuse most beneficial to themselves, in that case the economical one was best to create a bond with the victim obligated by financial necessity to stay with them. Typical strategies were total financial dependency, limited access to money, items to buy and impediment to work even remotely with obligation to renounce the job or not taking into consideration taking one at all. Women who abandoned their careers had to suffer the mental repercussions of those situations that bonded them indefinitely with their abuser even after the pandemic.

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     Abuse that started during the early 2020 might continue even today and be still shaped by that year when it comes to availability of services that are mostly obsolete, escape plans and hopes crushed every day, along with comfort found only on a bright smartphone screen. The isolation and dynamics of the pandemic were exactly what made domestic violence different and unusual from what we’ve always known and is the reason why too many authorities were unprepared to offer a hand. Not because they didn’t want to but because they didn’t have the resources to. With resources we talk about the scarcity of money at the moment and that created new abuse with financial dependency. What we can constatate is that solutions are available and can be applied with the help of active actions against domestic violence. Based on Su Z. et al, authorities in particular revest an important role in this and have to help victims to maintain distance with the accuser when separated with techniques like disguise to avoid stalking, create new shelters around the country that don’t ask money and are open and accessible even with COVID-19 restrictions, awareness of help on social media about the issue and especially in schools to help minimize harms and number of cases along with new laws and regulations that might not be in force or even exist in some countries (2021). The laws are imperative to ensure justice and the safety of human rights, in particular for the fact that everyone has the right of living a life without aggression. Physical abuse is horrible but tying IPV to it and making bruises the only proof for abuse is very limiting especially when abusers progress in this modern era taking advantage of legislative flaws. Offenders shouldn’t be able to get impune only because they didn’t hit a woman, that is why many don’t even denounce the tragic events and decide to live on with mental wounds. The psychological aftermath is marked by low-trauma similar to the one of veterans and full of vulnerabilities that follow the injured even after finally cutting off the toxic relationship, such damage shouldn't go on as invisible to the public anymore.