COVID and Domestic Violence
COVID and Domestic Violence
Sociologists have studied how the poor are "shuffled" across institutional settings, often due to bureaucratic moves to address short-term crises and manage fiscal budgets. Rather than alleviate suffering, such shuffling has the opposite effect, "trapping" marginalized individuals in a "web" of state systems.
See: Paik 2021; Halushka 2023; Sirois 2023; Lara-Millan 2017; Seim 2017; Sackett and Laureau 2023
This research sees "like the state", attending to the bureaucratic dynamics that cause marginalized individuals to be shuffled across institutional settings. How do individuals themselves make decisions to navigate their "shuffle", and how does gender shape these dynamics?
This research draws on 14 months of qualitative research, including 60 interviews with domestic violence professionals and survivors conducted by the principal investigator, Dr. Paige Sweet.
We find that women face uniquely gendered risks that drive their shuffling across institutional and intimate spheres, prolonging their precarity and instability. Women's roles as mothers drove when they chose to leave a setting, call police, press charges, and move between family support and shelter stays. In addition, women risked threats of sexual and intimate violence in private settings that drove them to seek institutional support. However, shelters posed the risks of further surveillance and lack of freedom.
This research has both theoretical and empirical contributions. Theoretically, by bringing gender to the forefront of our analysis, our work shows how systems-shuffling for women is driven by risk-based decision making related to gender and sexuality. We challenge previous literature that assumes private settings act as "breaks" or "respites" from the shuffle.
Empirically, our interviews uncover what resources actually helped domestic violence find stability during their shuffle and in the COVID-19 more specifically, allowing us to develop recommendations for the institutional settings and actors tasked with helping these women reach stable, healthy living situations.