Domestic Violence Increased During Lockdown In The United States

By Emily Reynolds From the very beginning of the pandemic, activists and charities raised concerns that lockdown could be having an impact on domestic violence. Women’s Aid noted that home is often an unsafe environment for those experiencing abuse, while earlier this year Refuge stated that they’d seen a 60% increase in monthly calls to their National Domestic Abuse helpline. A new study, published in Psychology of Violence, looks at rates of intimate partner violence during the pandemic in the United States. Like data from the UK, it suggests that domestic violence increased during lockdown — and that this was particularly linked to stress. Participants were 510 adults based in the United States, all of whom had been in a relationship for at least six months and had consumed at least one alcoholic drink in the month prior to the study’s start. On average they had spent six days a week with their partner during lockdown. After sharing demographic data, participants completed a measure of Covid-19 related stress, indicating how much the pandemic had impacted their life or behaviour, and whether they had experienced physical, psychological, social, economic or health-related stressors in its wake. They also shared how much alcohol they had been consuming in terms of both frequency and quantity. Next, participants completed a measure related to psychological and physical abuse, which assessed the perpetration of intimate partner aggression in the six mo...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Coronavirus Relationships Source Type: blogs