Gender-based violence in pandemic. Podcast GRADE Conversa 16 featuring Angelo Cozzubo (University of Chicago and PUCP)
The expansion of COVID-19 forced goverments to implement social isolation measures that, in turn, created unique conditions for increase violence. During the months of quarantine in Peru, non-essential services were closed, including non-reporting services for victims of violence such as the Women’s Emergency Centers. Police stations did not close, but the availability of police to attend victims decreased. In probable relation to this, the flow of calls received by the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable People’s Line 100 increased notably: in February 2020, the month before the beggining of the quarantine, 13,000 calls were received. Five months later it received twice, 26,000. These figures show a significant growth in the demand for family violence services. Although the category “family violence” is useful, it standardizes cases by mixing different groups of affected people, types of violence and levels of risk of violence. We asked ourselves: What type of violence increased in Peru during the quarantine and who was affected?
We talked with Angelo Cozzubo, associated researcher at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center , NORC and professor at the Departament of Economics of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Together with Wilson Hernández (GRADE), José Carlos Aguilar (PUCP), Denise Ledgard (PNUD Peru) and Jorge Agüero (University of Connecticut) assessed the impact of these social isolation measures due to COVID-19 on gender-based violence during the first 14 weeks of quarantine. The paper has been published by UNDP.
