@Chiara_Condi please do!
ps - Hermien Botes from Anglo American working GBV in mining
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Would love to chat!!
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yes I can send anyone who is interested the documents !
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I think we will see more community and familial pressure on adolescent girls to form sexual relationships with older men, to help alleviate some of the economic pressure on families. There is the immediate issue of sexual exploitation here, plus the related risks of early marriage, teenage pregnancy, later abandonment etc. These men could be employees of businesses.
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The SG of the UN is launching a report on Thursday on the impact of COVID on women and this topic will feature in it
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Yes please Chiara or perhaps BFP can send these with the summary?
Just to be clear, Covid (or any public health emergency) doesn’t cause violence. Violence against women and girls is driven by gender inequality – unequal power relations between women and men. Yet in times of crisis, those underlying inequalities are exacerbated, and emerging evidence suggests rates of domestic violence have increased in COVID-affected areas, due to growing household stress over health and economic shocks, forced cohabitation (often in small and/or cramped living spaces), and the increased family workload for women, sometimes combined with remote working. Importantly, the pandemic has also had a huge impact on support for survivors – those experiencing violence cannot access safe spaces or refuges, are often stuck at home with their abuser, and the usual social safety nets of workplaces/colleagues/friends and family, where they may find support and advice have rapidly changed, leaving many people isolated.
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Yes and services to help them will not be available
You also asked what will the impact for business be. DFID, its partners, companies and investors have a compelling moral and ethical responsibility to address violence in the workplace and to prioritise the wellbeing of employees/communities that firms and investors work with. It makes business-sense too, findings from ‘What Works to Prevent Violence’ show that intimate-partner violence not just violence in the workplace has a high productivity cost to firms, and to the economy. Safeguarding violations can lead to reputational issues both for DFID investments, and for firms and investors, as demonstrated in early 2018 with heightened focus on sexual exploitation, abuse and sexual harassment in the aid sector. Finally, action is also required to meet the recommendations in the ILO Convention to combat Violence and harassment in the world of work.
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I’m also concerned about what is going to happen to healthcare services for women, including for rape response/contraception/abortion
This is a fantastic resource Jane - thanks so much for posting and pulling it together - very practical - e.g. the interesting point about introducing new security measures such as a code word or phrase that can trigger a management intervention to find a safe way to discuss strategies to ensure their safety or to trigger a line manager or team leader to call the police.
This reminds me of the reports i’ve read from France and Italy who have introduced the password ‘Mask-19 for survivors of abuse to use in pharmacies and shops as a trigger to alert services/police. Does anyone have any evidence of these approaches working and should we be encouraging companies to lobby governments to adopt these?
Chiara, If they are for public consumption, you can share documents here on this platform.
As physical stalking around the workplace has gone down with the confinements/lockdowns across the world, online stalking and harassment is likely to increase - that’s certainly the evidence from Italy and Spain. With an increase in domestic violence during confinement, there are ways in which perpetrators may disrupt survivors work when they are working form home via tele-work - surveillance, coercive control can be online, by text and social media. These are all forms of domestic violence.
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We applaud Avon for doing this!
In some countries reproductive services have been reduced, and women have less access to them.
Agreed @LeeWebster, women are already in the most vulnerable roles and precarious working positions and the COVID-19 crisis will exacerbate age, gender, and disability inequalities and place women, girls, and other vulnerable populations at increased risk of gender-based violence (GBV) and intimate partner violence, so women in these populations will experience even more of disadvantage
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Natalie I would to participate in this campaign, is it possible?
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How do we encourage businesses to maintain that moral and ethical responsibility - I think that is a key question. We are already seeing some businesses reclassify their GBVH work as “non-essential”.
This sounds great Natalie, government action is paramount. And how is Avon using its incredible networks to support individual women at this time? Would love to hear more.
Yep and mental health support need to heal form the trauma of online abuse and violence
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