Analysis of gender violence in the pandemic

On October 7, the University of Birmingham together with the Global Institute of Innovation held a series of academic panels entitled Living With The Pandemic & Gender Based Violence (Living in the Pandemic and Gender Violence).

The event had three speakers who approached the subject from different perspectives. One of them was Silvana Tapia, professor of Law at the University of Azuay and director of the project "The impact of COVID-19 on the lives of Ecuadorian academic women."

According to Hisham Mehanna, moderator of the panel and professor at the University of Birmingham, the objective was "to bring together academics to share their research on the pandemic, in this way it is intended to understand its effects and work on solutions."

The panel began with a presentation by academic Caroline Bradbury-Jones who spoke about the consequences of COVID-19 on domestic violence.

Bradbury pointed out that globally 1 in 3 women has suffered from gender violence at some time in their life and that being in isolation these figures increase. In turn, he stressed that 38% of femicides are committed by couples.

When talking about the pandemic, the UN described that, by having to quarantine and remain isolated, cases of domestic violence have increased by 20%, thus generating the call shadow pandemic term used to refer to a pandemic that is in the shadow of another.

Similarly, Bradbury commented that "the pandemic is a perfect storm that triggers an unprecedented wave of domestic violence." So she added that isolation has become a paradox since it tries to protect us from the virus, but puts millions of women around the world at risk.

The second panellist was Heather Flowe with her research titled “Protecting Children From Sexual Violence During COVID-19”.

Flowe conducted her study focusing on gender-based violence in Kenya, where she found that before the pandemic the average age of children who suffered sexual violence was 16 years, while it is now 12 years.

Similarly, Dr. Flowe pointed out that less than 40% of the victims seek help and this is due to several factors, distrust towards the victims and the authorities is one of them. In turn, Flowe indicated that "the first 2 months of the pandemic there were 58 rapes by the police in Kenya."

The last panelist was Silvana Tapia who, so far, has conducted 17 in-depth interviews with various academics and scientists from Ecuador. Tapia commented that what most impressed them about the research is that the majority of academics preferred not to work on campus again, despite the fact that when doing it from home their workload is much higher.

During her interview, Tapia indicated that this is due to a set of factors: “One of them is hostility in the work environment, since being a minority, especially in hard science careers, women have a feeling vulnerability ”.

He added that "another factor is discomfort at not being able to participate in institutional decisions."

The UDA professor indicated that in Ecuador social and legal services are intermittent and inefficient, so the system was not prepared to deal with gender-based violence during quarantine; in turn, she reported that most women did not know where to go in these cases. 

Asked how this can be changed and if that change only depends on the authorities, Tapia replied:

“The problem is not only that they have not judged, it is more a matter that has to do with budget financing, for example, last year more than 80% of the budget allocated to the fight against gender violence was reduced, to the prevention of adolescent pregnancy and sex education ”.

UDA Correspondent