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Gender-based violence prevention, risk mitigation and response during COVID-19

Countries
World
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UNHCR
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This briefing note aims at giving an overview of risks of gender-based violence (GBV) in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. It also includes recommendations to mitigate risks and ensure access to lifesaving GBV services. The last section contains a list of useful resources.

Women and girls of concern to UNHCR are likely to experience distinct challenges and risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, and as such the outbreak might exacerbate already existing risks of GBV. Confinement is expected to increase risks of intimate partner violence for displaced women and girls, while worsened socio-economic situation will expose refugee women and girls in particular to increased risks of sexual exploitation by community members as well as humanitarian workers. In parallel, access to regular GBV services is likely to become challenging for survivors.

GBV risks

During previous outbreaks of virus and disease, women were less likely than men to have power in decision making around the outbreaks, and their needs therefore were largely unmet. For example, during the Ebola outbreak, resources for reproductive and sexual health were diverted to the emergency response, contributing to a rise in maternal mortality in a region with one of the highest rates in the world. Implications of the COVID-19 outbreak for women and girls might include increased caregiving and household responsibilities such as having to care for sick family members and handle additional childcare demands. This can in turn limit women and girls’ access to services, including critical health services. Increased caregiving responsibilities might also limit access to and time available for education and livelihood activities and as such increase vulnerability. Inadequate living conditions of vulnerable female-headed households might increase the risk of infection.

Women, girls and vulnerable groups are at increased risk of GBV during such epidemics due to limited involvement and control in decision-making on a household's response, and shifts in social safety nets, mobility and access to information/services. School closures and quarantines further contribute to exacerbate these risks.

Experiences have demonstrated that where women are primarily responsible for procuring and cooking food for the family, increasing food insecurity as a result of the crises may place them at heightened risk, for example, of intimate partner and other forms of domestic violence due to heightened tensions in the household.

As the socio-economic situation of displaced persons worsens, risks of intimate partner violence (IPV), survival sex, transactional sex and sexual exploitation and abuse by community members and humanitarian workers are heightened. Increased risks of IPV are already emerging from trends reported in China during the outbreak, with NGO staff reporting that numbers of complaints to local police station tripled. With an increase in the need to collect water and fuel, which is often a role performed by women and adolescent girls, there is likely to be an increase in the number of trips made and the distance travelled in search of fuel. This puts women and girls at increased risk of sexual violence. Adolescent girls will face heightened risks of forced and early marriage.

Reduced access of women and girls to GBV services due to quarantines and closures of services might impact immediate safety and health of survivors. Life-saving care and support to GBV survivors (i.e. clinical management of rape and mental health and psycho-social support) may be disrupted in onestop crisis centers in tertiary level hospitals when health service providers are overburdened and preoccupied with handling COVID-19 cases.

While the infection of Ebola reported more cases among males, females have been disproportionally affected by the social and economic consequences as women have generally lower levels of education and more limited marketable skills, and their income-generating activities were more vulnerable to Ebola-related economic shocks. Similar impact on women is expected in the context of COVID-19 epidemic.