Hey friends.
Hope you are doing well.
Every country right now is under lockdown and they all have different rules. With China being the first country to be impacted a lot of secondary issues have been reported. Racism was the first and foremost and then we got lockdown. Hopefully, the racism on a physical, mental and social level has died down (we won’t know the extent of the underlying issues as yet) domestic violence is spreading not only as common as it was/is associated with romantic relationships but it’s increased amongst all age groups; even with parents and children. Currently, China has reports of this. According to the articles I’ve read, in China people often seek help from close relatives and friends when it came to domestic violence but now that people’s “support is diminished and the external support has shrunk,” quotes one article women’s groups have warned and are warning about the dangers of living under lockdown.
Never in history did we ever live with this, where so quickly, so much freedom has gone all at once, along with jobs and the rug pulled right under people’s feet so quickly and abruptly. People are coming from fear. High doses of fear breeds negativity – T. Dench Patel, 3 April 2020, 16:01 When I go back to my own experience with domestic violence it happened around the time when the real impact took it’s tall during the economic crisis in Spain. I worked as a teacher and got very few hours teaching English that I was left with hardly anything at the end of the month but saying that I was also writing my first novel and paid my part of the rent always. I am just going to tell you in a nutshell how everything degenerated so that if this begins you know how this pattern can end or could roughly go. Hopefully, this will save you from more damage.
It started with, the things my friends were doing was no longer affordable to me, my friend circle shrunk, this enabled my partner to have more power over me, most days I was sitting at home, my positivity shrunk, my personal power shrunk, my happiness shrunk, my popularity shrunk, my image shrunk, I trusted my then partner but he didn’t trust me even though I gave or demonstrated no reason to not be trusted, he had his job, I began to get up, the minute he saw that happening I was piled with more dramas which took away all my energy and any spare money left in my pocket from the teaching job. I began to self-sabotage and then I bought into the emotional bullying day in and day out which eventually hit my moral and morale. The power shifted to him, I thought as soon as I get back into the work scene full-time and better-paid everything would be fixed (how wrong I was). He lost his job, I got a job and then he kept making distractions so that I don’t focus on the job, distraction after distraction, all focus on him, I even got us through with paying the bills and my part of the bargain to make up for any “owing factors of the past.” I lost all the energy and before I knew it, I was dealing with defamation three years later and a lot of money gone into lawyer’s fees after the relationship was over. So, it took a few years to escalate to the point of breaking up and dealing with anxiety, panic attacks, a couple of nightmares (literal and figurative) and a whole lot more. Having no money in your pocket, independence or nothing to hold onto your happiness and security are very vulnerable places to be. To be a refugee, illegal immigrant or a foreigner who needs their job to fund their family and papers or hope for papers and then to lose their job is the perfect recipe for domestic violence. Take this from someone who has been there.
La casa de las Madres is a non-governmental organisation that helps women who are victims of domestic violence. They constantly get calls but believe that this is going to escalate amid the COVID-19. This article states that The National Domestic Violence Hotline has seen an increase in the calls in terms of the number of survivors reaching out to them because of how abusive partners are leveraging the COVID-19 to add more fear into their relationship. This is coming out from the article in the link, “Between March 10 and March 24 we have had 951 contacts who have mentioned COVID-19,” Ray-Jones said. Woman, Inc. (United States of America) says they have a slight increase in calls. One county in the United States of America has seen a 35% increase in domestic violence cases filed in March 2020 compared to March 2019. Here is the article in case you want to go deeper into it.
Now, what happens to the most vulnerable people who are secretly taking domestic violence? Before their kids were at least at school. The stay home measures have now made many victims available to their abusers and open to further abuse. Billions are really at the mercy of this virus.
Fears of Domestic Violence rise as Millions confined
When I was living in Spain and even now Spain has a crazy number of women being murdered through domestic violence and one more just added where a 35-year old mother of two was murdered by her partner last week.
I still believe it’s more than this list on the link, when I lived there it was not uncommon to hear of an incident ever so very often.
So as I look at this article South African police receive 87 000 gender-based violence calls during the first week of lockdown I can’t help asking what about those who haven’t called as yet in South Africa or around the world? This was another article of mine I’ve written some time back.
According to this; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States of America:
- 1 in 4 women and nearly 1 in 10 men have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported some form of IPV-related impact.
- Over 43 million women and 38 million men experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
In India, this has also increased. Here is what The National Commission for Women Headquarters in India has to say.
Furthermore, this article reporting for India states a lot more but this is what caught my attention.
“The 58 is just complaints we have received on email. The real figure is likely to be more since the bulk of complaints come from women in the lower strata of society who send us their complaints by post,” she explained.”
There are just tons of things happening right now around domestic violence that it’s evidence we have a lot more “other diseases” that are mutating amongst COVID-19.
Here are more latest articles for your perusal.
Council of Europe – Secretary-general concerned about increased risk of domestic violence
United Kingdom – When home is more dangerous than Coronavirus
Domestic violence increases in France
Cities around the world go on lockdown, victims of domestic violence look for a way out
https://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/publications/emergencies/COVID-19-VAW-full-text.pdf
Women or men out there going through this, find help and mostly follow your intuition.
Be safe, healthy, happy, and strong. I know it’s easier said than done. We’ll get through this.
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
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Note: Do keep referring back to this site as much as possible, as I grow, a more profound perspective may form and so I will always come back to each of these articles to reevaluate them.
