Women’s Groups Fight Back As Gender-Based Violence Surges During the Pandemic

Barely weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns arose about the safety of women trapped indoors with their abusers, and data showing spikes in gender-based violence (GBV) quickly reached the news headlines. But women’s rights organizations all over the world had already anticipated the worst. They knew that economic downturns, natural disasters, and disease outbreaks tend to have disproportionate impacts on women — women would experience the effects first, worst, and for longer. For decades their work had focused on the ways in which decisions made by governments, and government failures, disproportionately impact women, and they realized right away that this pandemic would be no exception.

Although already under pressure from lack of funding and official support in the best of cases, and under brazen attack from anti-rights forces in the worst, women’s rights organizations rose to the challenge. As highlighted in the recent report released by the global civil society alliance CIVICUS, “Solidarity in the Time of COVID-19,” civil society organizations and activists across the world have responded to the pandemic by filling gaps left by both the market and the state; women-led initiatives were often at the forefront of the response, helping not just women but a wide panoply of vulnerable populations. Among them, organizations working against GBV led the way in redirecting resources to upscale their work and finding innovative ways to connect with, and protect, women at risk.

More often than not, women’s rights organizations did not wait for state authorities to step in, but rather took the initiative while at the same time urging policymakers to meet rising needs. The Tunisian Association of Democratic Women issued an early warning to its government, pointing at the likely impacts that lockdowns would have on already vulnerable populations and the measures that needed to be urgently taken in response. Women’s rights advocates in many countries also pressured their governments into recognizing the gendered impacts of the pandemic, with rising levels of GBV becoming a pandemic within a pandemic, and called for an equally gendered approach to post-pandemic reconstruction.

In some cases, women’s organizations had to confront the authorities head-on to make sure that women’s needs were met. The Mor Çatı Women’s Shelter Foundation, one of the first organizations in Turkey to focus on combating violence against women, realized that the police were giving women experiencing GBV false information about available services, so it took to social media to communicate the vital message that the police were obliged to receive and act on GBV complaints and that shelters were in fact open. As the courts in Tunisia closed, the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women successfully lobbied the high council of the judicial system and the minister of justice to have GBV cases included among the emergency cases that courts could hear during lockdown.

In other initiatives, civil society worked with government bodies to help women. In Malawi, the Centre for Social Concern and Development pushed for the inclusion of GBV prevention information in materials on COVID-19 prevention prepared and distributed by health care providers, while in Mexico, a civil society campaign called on the government to adopt a cross-sectional, rights-based approach to address the impacts of the pandemic on women and to allocate the resources needed to implement gender justice policies.

As they found themselves subjected to emergency restrictions and therefore unable to continue working as usual, activists explored additional and alternative ways to help women report violence and protect themselves against abuse. A common tactic was to adapt and scale up phone and web-based helplines and counselling services, and to provide services through alternative platforms, including WhatsApp and other cellphone apps, to offer women locked down with their abusers multiple channels to call for help.

To disseminate hotline numbers, activists resorted to creative methods. In Lebanon, the Resource Centre for Gender Equality launched a campaign, #LockdownNotLockup, asking people to share their hotline from their windows and balconies, while producing “camouflage videos” with their hotline number secretly embedded in tutorials and in subtitles, so that more women could safely watch them while confined with their abusers. Camouflage strategies became popular, as attested by the experience of Brazil’s Observatório de Favelas, an organization focused on slums and urban issues, which disseminated vital information about the virus and hygiene measures to avoid infection via text messages, voice memos, catchy memes, and infographics, throwing tips on how to get help if experiencing GBV into the mix.

New technologies were also combined with older ones to reduce coverage gaps, as seen in the experience of Malawi’s Centre for Social Concern and Development, which used social media, WhatsApp, a podcast, community radio, and TV appearances to share messages in a variety of languages. It also distributed flyers and brochures at key locations, such as grocery stores and water fountains, and used a loudspeaker vehicle when touring villages, to encourage girls and young women to protect themselves, report violence, and seek help.

Beyond technology-based approaches, women’s organizations across the globe used creative thinking and fostered strategic connections to overcome obstacles and solve problems. For instance in Mexico, the National Network of Shelters was able to scale up its rescue operations by establishing alliances with private companies such as Avon and Uber to arrange logistics and transportation; as a result, rescues have increased exponentially during the pandemic. In India, the International Foundation for Crime Prevention and Victim Care, which had already been offering WhatsApp counseling and access to a cloud-based service for victims to safely store evidence of abuse, started working with the Tamil Nadu state administration to issue travel passes for women to move safely during lockdowns, and worked with the police to move abusers out of the house.

Amid the pandemic, organizations working on GBV could not discontinue their in-person services without putting women at greater risk, so many devised and implemented new protocols to continue operating shelters, emergency centers, transition houses, and other facilities as safely as possible; they moved online all the services that did not need to be delivered in person, staggered appointments, and set up quarantine spaces for newcomers and isolation rooms for COVID-positive people inside their facilities.

While dedicating themselves to their mission of providing essential services to protect women against violence, women’s rights activists and organizations around the world have never stopped challenging the underlying causes of that violence — the gender norms and unequal power relations that place women in subordinate positions and deny them full personhood and agency. At a time when countless governments around the world are not only watching passively as lockdowns and emergency restrictions provoke dramatic increases in GBV, but also actively using the pandemic as a pretext to crack down on fundamental rights and as a smokescreen to revert past gains for women’s rights, women’s rights organizations are leading the response with creativity and determination.