The Second, Silent Epidemic: Rethinking Domestic Violence Under Lockdown
By Lianne Voon
Domestic violence has been characterised as the “second, silent epidemic” alongside Covid-19. Family harm experts and police had expected an increase in domestic violence during the lockdown and in response, took steps to raise awareness around existing services for support and prevention. Domestic violence agencies and help services were to remain open and relevant information about access given greater visibility. However, with rates of domestic violence continuing to rise under lockdown, it has become clearer than ever that our responses to domestic violence remain crippled by a fundamental mischaracterisation of the issue.
In reviewing the Family Justice System, the Family Violence Death Review Committee highlighted systemic failures in both the criminal justice system as well as the agencies created to respond to domestic violence. The criminal justice system was never designed for family violence, and as a result, subsequent developments and introductions of various agencies and help services have traditionally been divergences or additions which lack depth. Those who must navigate such systems face a convoluted and often incomprehensible process with little to no support, only to find that the available steps forward are short term, superficial, or patronising.
Ultimately, both the criminal justice system and family violence agencies only acknowledge independent incidents of physical abuse or confrontation and assume complete freedom between these events. Both responses to domestic violence are predicated on this model, perpetuating a flawed and incomplete understanding of domestic violence. Such an approach places additional burdens on those seeking safety and support, but also further institutionalises domestic violence destructiveness, inter-generational trauma and victim blaming.
Instead of constructing domestic violence out of individual events of harm, James Ptacek suggests intimate partner violence as being a pattern of social isolation, fear and coercion. Violence is more than specific behaviours which have been criminalised but a social entrapment engineered to operate interminably in any and all circumstances the target may encounter. This model identifies a predominant aggressor by looking beyond seemingly isolated events of physical confrontation to encompass all the acts that have been committed to isolate and control the target, even when they do not directly involve the target. Over time, social entrapment undermines the freedom and autonomy of the target, with physical violence and aggression acting as punishments which enforce the mechanisms of social entrapment. The circumstances which the current criminal justice system, agencies and help services acknowledge as domestic violence are only part of the whole, and it is clear that our legal and social responses are incomplete and inadequate.
At the heart of social entrapment are elements of coercive control. Evan Stark describes these in stark opposition to the criminal law characterisation of physical harm or the extension of threats of physical harm—he emphasises the true nature of social entrapment and domestic violence as an attack on individual autonomy and identity through the policing of the target’s behaviour, down to the most intimate, personal, and mundane. Stark reiterates that physical harm is about conditioning the target, and often with a cumulative effect. It is one of many tools used to terrorise, punish and degrade the target, and ultimate reinforce an individualised framework of regulatory control. When domestic violence is viewed through this lens, the presence of the abuser becomes secondary, and traditional markers of the severity of domestic violence such as immediacy and visibility are no longer able to silence or undermine those who are targeted.
The nature of lockdown in staying at a home address means a heightened risk of physical aggression and harm as targets are isolated with abusers, and the majority of advice and support surrounding family violence has been centred around this. Phone lines and websites are widely available and for those who are in immediate danger, suggestions include phoning the police, running outside and screaming for help, all of which reflect an individual events of harm model of domestic violence. However, when we apply a broader and more accurate framework of domestic violence, these options are no longer as viable, or safe, as they seem.
Lockdown has exacerbated every facet of domestic violence. Withholding daily resources such as soap and showers, supervising methods of communication like texts and emails, and restricting access to money and children in the event that action is taken against them, is an inextricable part of the daily pattern of violence that targets face. The social entrapment and coercive, controlling behaviours core to domestic violence which are often invisible become starkly apparent as the core mechanism of enabling and enacting harm.
How we examine circumstances, and the viable options and available resources we assume within those, must change both socially and legally. Such a framework would also enable us to capture certain factors which have not often been given due consideration: those who have faced collective levels of violence, those who have had multiple experiences of abuse and entrapment, and those whose personhood is most vulnerable to coercive control and conditioning due to factors such as socioeconomic status.
Only when we no longer think simplistically in terms of isolated incidents can our response to domestic violence become functional and comprehensive. Acknowledging and putting coercive control at the core of our response to family harm and domestic violence is crucial to dismantling institutionalised victim blaming. Targets of domestic violence will no longer be implicitly held responsible for their abuse or impeded in their efforts to bring their abuser to justice. Only then will the focus shift from pressuring a target to predict, report and escape physical harm to combating the cumulative and compounding effects of a primary aggressor’s intimate strategy of social entrapment and coercive control.
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