By Jori Hamilton

When the coronavirus emerged to upend our lives, we were ordered to stem the spread by taking shelter in our homes. But what if home isn’t your safe space? What if home is, for you, one of the most dangerous places in the world?

That is the case for millions of men, women, and children across the globe. The great fear is that the lockdown has only made matters far worse for abuse victims. In fact, it is now estimated that an additional 15 million domestic violence events will occur in the US as a direct result of the “lockdown”.

That’s because now, all buffers have been removed. As we retreat into our homes, there is nothing to limit the amount of time a victim is at risk from their abuser, no work or school to escape to, no time away. And then, add to this the financial pressures of massive layoffs, the fear of the virus, and the increased access to alcohol and drugs that inevitably comes with more time spent at home and you have a perfect storm of danger. But how exactly can victims recognize their dangerous environment and what resources can they use to protect themselves?

Isolation: The Abuser’s Best Friend

When the extent of the danger the coronavirus poses truly began to be realized, the first thing nations around the world did was “lockdown”. In the absence of viable treatments, the only best and really only way to fight the virus was to give it no opportunity for person-to-person spread. As of mid-March, virtually the entire United States was in quarantine. Schools, businesses, and government offices were closed. Citizens were instructed to self-isolate in their homes for an indefinite amount of time.

But isolation isn’t just a tool we’ve turned to in order to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities from the spread of the virus — on the flip side, it’s also potentially allowed more victims to be isolated with their abusers at home, in a setting that is more difficult to escape from. Through stay-at-home orders to protect people from infection, we have also inadvertently isolated victims.

This is easy to understand when one considers how it’s far easier to hurt, belittle, threaten, and terrorize victims if there’s no one there to see. That means that over the last weeks, assailants have been free to vent their rage, fears, and frustrations on their victims with impunity. It also means that, systematically, the victims’ trauma is being compounded. Their sense of power and security is being eroded, and unless they’re being physically or sexually assaulted, they may not even recognize they’re being abused. Sometimes, even physical or sexual aggression aren’t enough to make victims realize they are being abused, so destructive has the abuser been to the victim’s sense of their own power, their own worth, their own capacity to say no.

Over time, the psychological and emotional effects of systematic abuse can make people forget how it felt to be treated with gentleness, kindness, or to be handled with love and care. When a push, a pinch, a pull, or a slap becomes the only form of touch you get from the person who’s supposed to love you, that can come to be mistaken for love. When intimacy is never a personal choice, violation can begin to seem normal.

Mad at the World

It’s estimated that 1 in 4 women experience intimate partner violence (IPV) and as many as 1 in 7 women has actually incurred an injury at the hands of their partner. But it’s not just women who are suffering. As many as 1 in 9 men suffer severe abuse at the hands of an intimate partner. Current findings indicate there are especially high rates of IPV among transgender folx, as well as men and women in same-sex relationships.

And these alarming statistics were compiled before the pandemic that confined so many victims inside their homes with their abusers. First responders and domestic violence hotlines are already seeing a significant uptick in domestic violence reports since the lockdown.

The threat, though, isn’t just due to isolation and proximity. It also comes from the reality that being under quarantine is, in itself, an intense psychological stressor. Then you combine this with soaring unemployment rates and an increase in the use of drugs and alcohol to cope with the anxieties the pandemic is creating, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Those who aggress against their partners and children almost always have an inability to cope with the ordinary stressors of daily life, let alone to manage an unprecedented global crisis like this one. And so feelings of insecurity, fear, and hurt manifest in anger, which all too easily becomes emotional, verbal, and physical abuse.

With that said, it’s imperative to remember that there is, of course, NO justification for abuse and it is never the victim’s fault. The choice to abuse, and the responsibility for the abuse, falls squarely and completely on the abuser themselves, no matter what stressors they may claim drove them to committing the abuse. Still, it’s important to be cognizant of how these high-stress situations, especially if these are combined with the abuse of alcohol or drugs, are precisely the conditions in which domestic violence is most likely to occur.

Peace at Last

The devastating cascade of violence, from frustration and fear to rage and attack, is what makes anger management programs so vitally important, particularly during these troubled times. But you don’t have to wait for the pandemic to end to get help. There are tools that abusers and victims alike can do to reach out, find safety, and restore peace in the home.

Social networking and video conferencing technologies, for instance, are for more than online concerts and virtual cocktail hours. You can also use them to connect with mental health counselors as well as domestic violence experts. These professionals can help perpetrators work through their mental health challenges including developing strategies to help them cope with the emotions that all too often lead to the abuse.

Likewise, counselors can help victims protect themselves, both physically and psychologically, from the abuse. This can include helping them to identify situations in which abuse is more likely to occur and connecting them with resources to get themselves to safety when the situation becomes too dangerous.

Because, virus or no virus, there is still help available. And if you are in fear for your safety, then you must get out, no matter what. As frightening and dangerous as the virus may be, there may come a time when the abuser is even more so. And that is the time to break the quarantine, to get out and get help. It is still out there, and you have the right to it, the right to find a refuge in this storm that is truly that, a refuge.

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If you are impacted by abuse and need support call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. If you’re not able to speak safely, log on to thehotline.org or text LOVEIS to 1-866-331-9474