One of the ugliest outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic is the considerable increase in the incidence of domestic violence. This is yet another result of the measures taken to contain the virus, which governments should have foreseen and done something about. Occasions when families are gathered together in ways which are not part of everyday life, are notorious for resulting in violent and abusive behavior, a phenomenon well documented, and in the best case scenario, prepared for.
Every social worker, every policeman and every family therapist could have predicted that a lockdown for weeks on end, compelling the confinement of families in limited space, was a recipe for what has actually happened; an increase of reported incidents of women being abused by 18% in Spain, 30% in France and 20% in the UK, and we are nowhere near the end of the pandemic.
I borrowed the title of this article from a project founded and run by a friend in England. Like her, I have been involved, in a variety of capacities, with the campaign to raise awareness of the blight on society of violence against women in their own homes. It is a problem which has been around since the beginning of time. It scars all societies and involves all classes, all types of people, some worse than others with minority groups in every society suffering the most.
Although slow to recognize that governments have a responsibility to take the phenomenon seriously and to act on it, in 2020 most developed countries do have a policy in place, though the actual financial and regulatory provisions are universally inadequate.
The great majority of the abusers are male. Though courts frequently hear attempts to make a woman equally responsible for domestic violence, there is no getting away from the fact that there is an imbalance in any conflict between male and female partners. It is all about power and control. Men are simply more physically powerful than women and being able to exercise power in order to establish control, appears to be at the heart of the majority of domestic disputes.
Dr. Virginia Goldner, an American psychoanalyst and family therapist, has spent many years both examining the nature of domestic violence and developing a method of dealing with it. Her work has underlined the complexities of the relationships which result in a woman being ferociously attacked, frequently severely wounded or even murdered. There are not a few cases where there is love and friendship between partners until there is a violent eruption and many cases in which a battered woman will return to a violent partner despite it all, a puzzling result to many, like myself who have witnessed it. Goldner’s response has been couples therapy, starting with the acceptance by both partners that violence is not to be tolerated and that the aim is to achieve safety, accountability and equality in the partnership.
These principles take into account that domestic abuse can take forms other than violence. Victims may arrive at shelters for abused women, like the one in Jerusalem with which I was associated, complaining of being cut off from their families and friends by their partner, of having no access to their own earnings, of being deprived of privacy, not even being allowed to lock themselves into the toilet, having only one mobile phone in the house which he controls, and so on. As a journalist in the New York Times recently reported, these are methods which closely resemble those used to break the will of prisoners.
The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics recorded 68,000 cases of domestic violence against women in this country in 2018, a figure considered by those running the shelters to be a considerable under-estimate.
In the same year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after visiting the Jerusalem shelter, promised to chair a committee to examine the problem, saying much more had to be done about it. A previous ministerial committee had failed to follow up on a promised NIS 50 million fund to assist projects aimed at helping the victims of domestic violence. Three task forces created since 2014 to tackle the problem have produced few results, and no funding data is available for the years 2017 and 2018. Last year the government voted against a commission of inquiry into violence against women. The shelters that do exist, offering a roof over their heads, legal advice and employment recommendations to abused women, do receive some government funding, but depend to a large extent on private donations and charities.
Every year, we have an International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. And now the UN has called for urgent government action to deal with the problem. It is a pity the action was not taken before a virulent virus caused large numbers of vulnerable women to be locked down with violent partners.
The writer is an author, former journalist and former head of the British Desk at the Jerusalem Foundation