Domestic violence through the window of the COVID-19 lockdown: a public crisis embodied/exposed in the private/domestic sphere

Abstract

COVID-19 has been recognized globally as a public health crisis, which has directly led to the deaths of more than 40,000 people in the UK (World Health Organization, 2020). The lockdown measures in the public sphere have created a window into the existing violence in the domestic sphere, as increasing incidents and reports have propelled what is more often thought of as private violence into the public gaze. The COVID-19 lockdown in the UK has made visible a collapse of the public and private sphere, blurring the boundaries between the two. As work and childcare have moved within the home, the structural inequalities of austerity have been exposed and the widening gender, class and racial cracks of society are illuminated in lockdown. Our paper draws upon an intersectional cultural and materialist analysis to explore how the cultural and economic bricks of the public and private sphere have been layered through the tools of i) representation and marginalization in the public sphere; ii) the division of labor through the devaluing of care-giving and precarious work; and iii) the location of public and private legal issues. Through this critical intersectional analysis, we explore how the material construction of the public and private sphere is being dismantled in the long-term everyday crisis interventions of domestic violence support groups, Refuge, Women's Aid and Southall Black Sisters, and in relation to the authors' local interventions with CLOCK.

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