Partner violence on the rise during pandemic
The increasingly close contact that COVID-19 protocols are forcing on many families is escalating conflict between partners of all kinds who were already struggling in difficult relationships.
As a result, some North American social service agencies are adopting a “gender inclusive” stance toward the diverse range of people buffeted by partner violence, including heterosexual women and men, lesbians, gays and transgender people, say specialists.
During this coronavirus pandemic, agencies that try to support people in the midst of their domestic troubles are finding an increase in family problems across genders and sexual identities — including rising rates of separation, drug abuse, stress on children, controlling behaviour, loneliness, emotional aggression and violence.
It can help that more and more family agencies and shelters are preparing to assist members of groups who have traditionally been under-recognized in the field of partner violence, said Prof. Emily Douglas, head of the Department of Social Sciences at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.
“Not only straight women experience partner violence. And you can’t assume that everything that worked for supporting straight women would work for gay men,” Douglas, a leading expert in violence against children and partners, said in an interview after giving a recent webinar in Canada.
During the past decade, Douglas said, many U.S., Australian and Canadian specialists in family services have shown surging readiness to be more inclusive in the way they respond to the different kinds of people who experience partner violence.
With the “coronavirus further squeezing the family system” — with job loss, debt, lack of daycare, the need to home school and other pressures — Douglas said it’s impacting a range of identity groups, including some who didn’t receive much attention 10 years ago.
As a result, more transition houses for victims of partner violence in Massachusetts, Indiana, Rhode Island and Illinois are now “gender inclusive,” she said, by way of example. They have separate sleeping quarters for females and males, but many have “single-use bathrooms” for all genders.
Research in Canada and elsewhere shows that homosexual men and women encounter roughly the same levels of partner violence as those in heterosexual relationships, while data on transgender people is limited. Simon Fraser University criminologist Alexandra Lysova said partner violence in same-sex couples has been under-reported.
Many LGBTQ advocates maintain it’s important for law-enforcement officials to understand that gays, lesbians and bisexuals can be under additional pressures in volatile domestic situations, including fear of being treated unfairly if they report to police, worry about contributing to the stigmatization of LGBTQ people and anxiety about being “outed.”
Similarly, Douglas said, more social-service providers in North America are taking seriously the statistics that show about 12 per cent of the general population of the U.S. has at some point been the target of partner violence (about one-third of it severe) — “and that there’s really little difference between men and women regarding victimization.”
Don Wright, founder of a B.C.
organization that supports male survivors of sexual abuse and, in some cases, intimate-partner-violence (IPV), said during the COVID-19 pandemic some couples in already-contentious relationships are experiencing a ramping up of tensions.
But it’s a challenge to offer effective support in a time of physical distancing, since counselling largely has to be online or over the phone, said Wright, a senior official with the B.C. Society for Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse, which is financed by B.C.’s Ministry of Public Safety, Vancouver Coastal Health and donations.
The growing movement in the U.S. and elsewhere toward creating more gender-inclusive shelters for the diverse range of people who experience partner violence is “pretty progressive,” said Wright.
Some female victims of violence become afraid of men in general and don’t want to be in a shelter in which they’re around, Wright said. But he believes it’s still important to provide safe temporary refuges for homosexual and heterosexual males who experience partner violence, as well as their children.
There are 30 transition houses in Metro Vancouver specifically for women experiencing partner violence, Wright said, but none for males. Alberta, he said, is the only Canadian province that permits males fleeing domestic violence to use a selected number of its transition houses.
Statistics on intimate-partner violence vary according to the method by which they’re collected. For instance, Statistics Canada said that, in 2018, women accounted for 79 per cent of partner violence incidents reported to police, with males responsible for 21 per cent of the emergency calls.
However, Canada’s General Social Survey data on intimate partner violence, which is collected every five years through an extended questionnaire, discovered that 418,000 Canadian males and 341,000 females acknowledged being victims of spousal violence.
Lysova notes the social-survey data shows women tend to endure more sexual violence and the most severe kinds of physical violence, including homicide. Men are more likely to be subjected to slapping, kicking, biting, hitting with the fist and emotional abuse.
Lysova and Douglas are among many researchers who note heterosexual and homosexual males are less likely to report partner violence to police because they don’t like to be referred to as “victims” and worry authorities won’t believe them when they say their lives have been threatened.
“We haven’t yet understood the complexities of partner violence,” including during this pandemic, Douglas said. “But it’s exciting to see the field growing, and services slowly opening up to help a wider range of people.”