UN chief Antonio Guterres warns of 'horrifying' surge in domestic violence amid lockdown, urges nations to act
While governments around the world are doing their best to make people stay at home so that the COVID-19 doesn’t spread, yet another problem is surfacing and even the United Nations (UN) has expressed its concerns over it. It is about reports of alarming rise in domestic violence during the days of the lockdown.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has appealed to all governments to ensure the protection of survivors as a part of their response plans to the coronavirus crisis, which has claimed over 1.3 million lives worldwide. The problem is gender-specific as Guterres’ words on Sunday revealed.
Last month, Guterres, 70, had called for an immediate global ceasefire amid the outbreak. “I am calling for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world. It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives,” he said then.
On Sunday, the UN chief brought the focus to another fight and it was against conflicts inside homes. “I appealed for an end to violence everywhere, now. But violence is not confined to the battlefield. For many women and girls, the threat looms largest where they should be safest: in their own homes,” he said.
Although domestic violence can see either the male or female at the receiving end, research has shown that women and girls are victimized disproportionately. On Monday, April 6, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women, said while the last 12 months saw 243 million women and girls aged between 15 and 49 were subjected to sexual or physical violence by an intimate partner across the globe, the number was likely to go up even more with the advent of the pandemic.
“As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, this number is likely to grow with multiple impacts on women's wellbeing, their sexual and reproductive health, their mental health, and their ability to participate and lead in the recovery of our societies and economy,” Mlambo-Ngcuka said.
Guterres said something similar in his video address made on Sunday. He said economic and social pressures and fear have grown over the past weeks and there was a “horrifying global surge in domestic violence”.
The Portuguese secretary-general cited as evidence for his claim -- rise in calls to domestic violence support centres, overburdened healthcare and police services and limited funding for local groups that extend helping hand to survivors. It was then than Guterres urged governments across the world “to make the prevention and redress of violence against women a key part of their national response plans for COVID-19.”
Among suggestions that Guterres gave to deal with the concern were: making more investment in online services and civil society organizations; ensuring that judiciaries continued to prosecute abusers; setting up emergency warning systems in pharmacies and groceries; creating safe ways for women to seek support, without alerting the abusers, etc.
From Asia to Europe to America, the situtation is grim
A UN News report showed on Monday that while calls to helplines have doubled in countries like Lebanon and Malaysia, they have tripled in China. In Australia, search engine Google has seen “the highest magnitude of searches for domestic violence help in the past five years.”
The New York Times reported on the horrific experience of a 26-year-old woman in China who said that the lockdown has made the conflicts between her and her husband bigger and frequent.
Even in European countries, the situation is not too good. In Spain, one of the worst affected nations, the emergency number for domestic violence got 18 percent more calls in the first couple of weeks of the lockdown compared to the same period a month earlier.
"We've been getting some very distressing calls, showing us clearly just how intense psychological as well as physical mistreatment can get when people are kept 24 hours a day together within a reduced space," Ana Bella, who formed a foundation to help other women after surviving domestic violence herself, was quoted as saying by NYT.
In France, where nearly 9,000 people have died from coronavirus so far, the police reported a nationwide rise in domestic violence by about 30 percent. The country’s interior minister, Christophe Castaner, said the officers have been asked to look out for cases of abuse.
USA Today analyzed data received from police agencies from across the US and it was found that though crime rates generally came down in recent times, distress calls over domestic violence went up by 10 to 30 percent among many communities in the second half of March compared to what it was in the earlier weeks. A report in NBC also said that instances of domestic violence were on the rise in March, as police data from 18 departments showed. It is being said that apart from isolation, financial hardship is another reason why cases of domestic violence are rising.