Domestic abuse isn’t caused by coronavirus – we’ve been ignoring women for years

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You’d think they sprang from nowhere. Lockdown abusers, loving partners driven to violence by circumstances beyond their control. “A fairly close-knit family, just normal” are found slaughtered alongside the family dog; “a loving 44-year marriage” ends with a husband accused of killing his wife; “a very nice, but very quiet” family fail to survive the first weekend of isolation.

And we’re told there’ll be more to come.

Even as everything seems to be changing, some things never do. In normal times – remember those? – we’d speak of “isolated incidents”, of honest men who would slaughter women as if out of the blue. Today, we say that “quarantine pressure started to take its toll”.

If coronavirus has highlighted anything, it’s the intractability of harmful beliefs about men and women.

It starts small, with employers assuming that female employees can’t trusted to work from home, or governments advising women to avoid “nagging” during lockdown. It ends with a “domestic abuse surge” which is blamed, not on perpetrators and the choices they make, but on the unique circumstances in which they find themselves (somehow these circumstances are always “unique”).

As Annie Brown writes, “domestic abuse was an epidemic long before we heard of coronavirus”. What the current pandemic has done is place it into sharper focus, since families in isolation are more at risk than ever.

Lockdown is not a cause of abuse, but a means by which it is made visible, its consequences suddenly accelerated. It’s a distinction we need to make clear – for the our ability to deal with it now relies on an understanding of its roots.

Right now, we are witnessing a particular urgency in efforts to support victims of domestic abuse. Priti Patel, the home secretary, has announced that victims may leave their homes during lockdown to seek help at refuges; domestic abuse experts are calling on the UK government to provide emergency funds to house those in need; in France, the government is pledging to house victims in hotels.

All of this makes sense and is welcome at a time of crisis – yet this particular crisis has been ongoing for years.

However generous Patel’s announcement, a decade of cuts has already forced one in six women’s refuges to close. Instead of ploughing resources into ending male violence, we have long treated it as a fact of life, every bit as apolitical as coronavirus. Now we’re reaping what we’ve sown.

Pre-lockdown times saw women in the UK killed at a rate of two per week. This should have been enough to prompt emergency measures. Instead it became normalised. We’d see the isolated incidents, but not the near misses; never the thousands of at-risk women lowering their voices, bowing their heads, hiding their friendships and money and hopes.

Such women voluntarily live locked-down lives, if the alternative is no life at all. It’s only now, when a pandemic places the spotlight on nice, quiet families in nice, quiet homes, that we see the fragility that’s always been there.

The cause of the current rise in abuse is not Covid-19; it’s the outcome of years of neglecting victims of “normal” abuse on the basis that it’s just that: normal.

Domestic abuse is not an invisible virus. It does not flourish because there is no known cure. It flourishes because we’ve been unwilling to tackle the root causes: inequality, misogyny, male entitlement, the erosion of social support networks. The “normal” times – the “before” times of two, perhaps three, weeks ago – should never have been accepted as such.

What today’s victims of violence live with, they have always been living with. Now we can see it up close, let’s not look away again.