Domestic violence during COVID lockdown

The lockdown slogan “Stay Home. The 56-page report, called “Grappling with the Shadow Pandemic: Women’s Groups and Domestic Violence in India”, collates experiences of victims and is aimed at providing a template of solutions for the government in the event of a similar situation arising in the future. The report says, “Our objectives in publishing this report and policy brief are to document some of the problems survivors of domestic violence faced during the pandemic and lockdown, to describe some state and women’s rights groups’ interventions and to put forward recommendations for immediate and long-term advocacy so as to be more pandemic/disaster prepared in the future. “Initial data and experiences of women’s rights organisations suggest that there were many more survivors of domestic violence than those who reached out for help. “Apart from the challenges that all women faced during the pandemic, women from marginalised and vulnerable communities went through other ordeals of discrimination—by people around them and even by state agencies… When dealing with domestic violence, organisations working for Muslim women’s rights face layered challenges, on one hand resisting patriarchy within the community and on the other, discrimination from the external systems such as the police.