Many domestic abuse charities were dismayed when the coronavirus lockdown was announced, with no thought for how women at risk would be protected during this time. Rooted in the knowledge of how domestic abuse works, they could immediately see why this policy could provide carte blanche to the perpetrators of abuse if it did not have adequate safeguards.
Domestic abuse is all about control. As the domestic abuse charity Solace’s Power and Control Wheel highlights, perpetrators do not need to use physical violence every day, and some never use it at all. Violence is used by perpetrators when they believe that other tactics are failing. Whilst domestic abuse is perpetrated by any sex, men are much more likely to use violence when they believe their tactics are failing, which is why so many woman are killed by their male partners. Other tactics that can be used by the abuser include sexual or financial control, bullying behaviour, denial and blaming the victim, and, crucially in this context: isolation.
Isolation tactics include refusing to look after the children if the victim wants to leave for work or other reasons, moving her to a remote place, and gradually distancing her from her support networks such as family and friends. With a policy dictating social isolation for all, the government have made this tactic much easier, and also morally sanctionable. It helps the abuser to see that isolating someone is acceptable, and not abusive. It plays into their distorted beliefs that isolation is really ‘protection.’ In this context, the government slogan ‘stay safe, stay at home’, implies you will be safe at home. For many women, this is simply a lie, and yet now the abuser has a government endorsed reason to continue.
The government have set a number of new rules in place as part of the C-19 lockdown, restricting how often people can leave the house and who people can and can’t see. In doing so, they are a larger embodiment of the way an abuser will sanction certain behaviours and disallow others. A perpetrator will see his partner as a possession and believe that she should obey him: the rules he imposes keep him knowing whether or not she is under his control. A victim might be told that she can only go out at certain times, to certain places, and that she is not allowed to see certain people. By mimicking this controlling behaviour at the national level, the government is setting a dangerous example for perpetrators.
As any victim understands, it is breaking the rules, whether these rules are clear to the victim or not, that will lead to an outburst. Sometimes she will deliberately refuse to comply, but most of the time she will unwittingly break a rule because the rules change arbitrarily. In either case, once the rules are broken, it throws the perpetrator into a sense of panic, and powerlessness: because the victim has asserted her own agency, it challenges his sense of control, triggering the desperate need to re-assert it. Sometimes his sense of control will be challenged by things that are nothing to do with the victim breaking a rule, but with the circumstances of the perpetrator’s life changing. Maybe he loses his job, puts on weight, or has to deal with the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic. In any case, it is at these times that the perpetrator will do whatever he can to stay in control himself: by controlling his partner, including using violence.
Perpetrators of violence use excuses to justify this violence to themselves, absolving them of guilt. They will do this both before, and after the violence has occurred. Typically, they will tell themselves that the victim deserves it, that they provoked it, that the victim only responds to violence. With the draconian use of lockdown, the government allows any perpetrator to use the lockdown measures as justification for violence. Using violence is OK because I had to force her not to leave the house. Using violence is OK because it’s the only way to keep her in and to keep us safe.
On top of creating an enabling environment, the government is exhibiting the same kind of cognitive dissonance that simultaneously facilitates and disavows the abuse. With the one hand they say they care about stopping domestic violence through initiatives such as the Domestic Abuse Bill, and Home Office support, yet other actions and messages send an alternative message. The result is confusion, which is ultimately exactly the kind of state that most victims of abuse will find themselves in day to day, preventing them from being clear about what is going on in their lives.
The statistics already give some indication of the dire situation for women experiencing domestic abuse during the pandemic. So far at least 19 women have been killed by my men during lockdown and the Met Police are answering roughly 100 domestic abuse calls per day. There have been over 4000 domestic abuse arrests in London in the 6 weeks from 9th March – 24th April, a 24% increase compared to the previous year.
It is tragic and paradoxical that the risk of death as a result of lockdown policies is higher for some than from the disease measures are supposed to combat. Had the government been more strategic and more cognisant of what damage the lockdown would do, then we would not have been seeing the rising numbers of deaths that we have already seen. When government analyses the deaths as a result of the coronavirus, it needs to consider the deaths of innocent children and women at the hands of their partners in lockdown, and the responsibility its policy had for it.