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Abstract
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Victims of domestic abuse may struggle to contact the police. But they are likely to seek help on the internet. By using internet search data to measure domestic violence during the Covid-19 pandemic, Dan Anderberg, Helmut Rainer and Fabian Siuda found an increase several times larger than that suggested in official police records.
Many types of crisis - such as economic recessions, natural disasters or disease outbreaks - raise stress levels and thus carry the risk of increasing domestic violence.1-4 In the case of Covid-19, the pandemic arguably led to a global "shadow pandemic" of violence against women.5 Effective policy responses require up-to-date reliable data on the scale of the problem. However, quantifying the prevalence of domestic violence is difficult at the best of times due to data limitations, and the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the problem in various ways.
Victimisation surveys have, under normal circumstances, become an accepted way of estimating prevalence rates for domestic violence. However, these surveys neither are available in real time nor provide information that is temporally granular enough to quantify the immediate impacts of policies such as those implemented during the pandemic.
An alternative data source that might have great potential as a proxy for the scale of domestic violence during crises like Covid-19 is information from domestic violence helplines or women's support charities. However, thus far this information has rarely been systematically collected or made available for research.
Language: en |