Abstract
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic violence came to be understood as a national emergency. In this paper, we ask how and why domestic violence was constructed as a crisis specific to the pandemic. Drawing from newspaper data, we show that the domestic violence victim came to embody the violation of gendered boundaries between “public” and “private” spheres. Representations of domestic violence centered on violence spilling over the boundaries of the home, infecting the home, or the home imploding. While theorists of crisis have focused on the central role of temporality in crisis construction, and especially the performative invocation of “new time,” we argue that crisis rhetoric often relies on anxiety about the transgression of spatial boundaries. Our spatial approach to crisis has two components. First, we argue that crisis framings often invoke the idea that seemingly distinct arenas of social life are becoming disorganized or blurred. And second, because thresholds between social spaces are coded as sacred during crisis, this spatial reordering is rendered dangerous, resulting in calls to resecure boundaries.
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Notes
As historians have shown, fears about family violence in the U.S. have long been fixated on the “cultural image of home life as a harmonious, loving, and supportive environment” (Gordon, 1988:2).
According to the Alliance for Audited Media, a digital edition “… is defined as a product distributed via electronic/digital means that maintains the basic identity of the host publication either by maintain the same name/log or by identifying itself as ‘an edition of ________,’ but contains different editorial and/or advertising content.” In rare cases, an identical article was produced as a digital edition and print edition with different publication dates. For these cases, the article with the earlier publication date is included and the later publication date is excluded. The difference in dates was under 5 days.
We excluded articles that did not have any correlation between group one and two words, but we included articles in which groups one and two had a relationship within the article. We followed this method for other niche articles in which words from group two were unrelated to a case mentioning words in group one, but we were liberal in including articles to capture an initial, broad collection of data.
In the academic and policy literatures, experts questioned the validity of quantitative data about domestic violence, especially police data, and expressed uncertainty about whether domestic violence was increasing and if it was, for whom and for how long. This is, in part, because what constitutes violence is itself contested (Merry, 2016) and it is further unclear if domestic violence statistics are actually capturing victimization rates, help-seeking behaviors, or third-party reporting trends (Piquero et al., 2021).
It matters that studies based on administrative data such as police calls were most commonly cited in newspapers during the first few months of the pandemic. Most research reports using police data reported an increase in domestic violence prevalence when compared to pre-pandemic times ( Piquero et al., 2021; Mendie et al., 2022; Boserup et al., 2020) with some studies indicating increases anywhere from 7.5% (Leslie & Wilson, 2020) to 22% (McLay, 2022). Most findings that reference hotline contact volume, on the other hand, indicate that domestic violence prevalence did increase during the pandemic, but only after shelter-in-place orders were lifted (Leigh et al., 2022; Wood et al., 2020; NNEDV, 2021). The National Domestic Violence Hotline (2022) reported the highest contact volume in the organization’s history in February 2022. Only studies using police data found evidence for domestic violence spiking during the pandemic’s “initial shock” (Henke & Hsu, 2022) or during the first months of the pandemic (Leslie & Wilson, 2020; Piquero et al., 2020).
Most survey data that measured survivors’ experiences during the pandemic found that domestic violence increased or worsened among those experiencing other forms of social marginality before and during the pandemic. These studies indicated that domestic violence during COVID was more prevalent or more severe among: those subjected to unemployment and pandemic-related job loss (Davis et al., 2021; Peitzmeier et al., 2022; Wake & Kandula, 2022; McNeil et al., 2022) and economic, housing, and food instability (Peitzmeier et al., 2022; McNeil et al., 2022); essential workers (Peitzmeier et al., 2022); people who stayed home all day (Henke & Hsu, 2022; Hsu & Henke, 2020), or were housewives or married (Wake & Kandula, 2022); those who were pregnant (Peitzmeier et al., 2022; Bueso-Izquierdo et al., 2022), lived with children (UN Women & Women Count, 2021), or had a toddler (Peitzmeier et al., 2022); people with mental illness and drug abuse habits (Wake & Kandula, 2022; McNeil et al., 2022) or impacted by the COVID-19 virus (Davis et al., 2021; Peitzmeier et al., 2022; McNeil et al., 2022); and LGBTQ + people (Peitzmeier et al., 2022; McCool-Meyers et al., 2022).
A survey conducted in Michigan during the first several months of the pandemic, however, shows that rates of domestic violence did not change, but severity of existing abuse increased for marginalized people (Peitzmeier et al., 2022).
Since poor and working-class women and women of color (arguably the most chronically burned-out parental figures) have historically engaged in “public” reproductive labor, this proposed solution continues to rely on these women’s labor to maintain a lived sense of the public-private divide as real for middle-class families (Collins, 1990; Parreñas, 2000; Duffy, 2007). Indeed, when it comes to poor and/or racialized families’ “private sphere” crises, dissolving and disregarding the boundary between public and private life is often seen as protective (Roberts, 2022). For example, these families’ private lives are subjected to sometimes chronic surveillance by state actors, such as Child Protective Service officers (Smith & Roane, 2023). As such, the public-private divide is a classed and racialized ideology that can only be lived as separate by some (see New York Times, December 29, 2020).
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Ann Swidler and Ryan Hagen for their excellent feedback on an earlier version of this paper, presented at the American Sociological Association meetings in 2022. Many thanks also to members of the Social Theory Workshop at the University of Michigan for their thoughtful comments and critiques.
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This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (Award 2116415).
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Sweet, P.L., Glenn, M.C. & Caponi, J. The domestic violence victim as COVID crisis figure. Theor Soc 53, 119–142 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-023-09533-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-023-09533-4