Did COVID-19 create an increase in domestic violence?

Data from some studies of domestic violence suggest that increases in domestic violence rates or severity were caused by the COVID pandemic. However, the evidence is not entirely consistent and the reasons for any change are not clear.

This paper goes beyond simple “strain” models that suggest that events like the pandemic simply “overwhelm the resources of the family unit, creating couple conflict and poor regulation of negative emotions” (p. 422). Instead of simply looking at changes in domestic violence rates that coincided with the pandemic, the researcher listened to the accounts of the impact of the pandemic that were offered by poor and marginalized survivors of domestic violence. Most of these survivors “experienced COVID as part of clustered vulnerabilities: the pandemic became another thing in the list of things that made them likely to experience continued abuse and social precarity, compounding problems like housing insecurity and dependence on violent partners” (p. 422). In other words, the impact on any one person depended on that person’s prior situation and vulnerabilities.

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