The Impact of the Covid-19 virus on Domestic Violence

Violence against women, especially by intimate partners, is one of the main problems throughout the world. Based on data from the World Health Organisation (WHO), as well as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) almost 30% of women worldwide are sexually or physically abused by their partners at least once in their lifetime: up to 38% of women’s deaths are caused by intimate partners, and only 11% of victims report the violence to the authorities. Women of any age are also exposed to various forms of violence in their homes by family members, usually referred to as ‘domestic violence’. Crises and times of unrest have been linked to increased interpersonal violence, including incidents of violence against women and children (Fraser, 2020 [1]). Pandemics are no exception. In fact, the regional or global nature and associated fear and uncertainty of pandemics provide an enabling environment that may exacerbate or spark diverse forms of violence. Fraser, E. (2020 [1]). Peterman et al. (2020 [2]) document nine (direct and indirect) pathways linking pandemics and violence to women. This paper presents a transdisciplinary approach to the problem of domestic female violence in Azerbaijan especially during COVID-19. It discusses the literature in terms of transdisciplinarity and then, with this as a contextual basis, considers how Azerbaijan might act. The advantage of a transdisciplinary approach to gender violence is that it analyses the problem as well as its possible causes and considers the consequences from different points of view and hence, can put forward various proposals to diminish the gender violence rate. Flood and Pease (2009 [3]) in an Australian study found two clusters of factors associated with domestic violence and these were; gender and culture. These had an influence at multiple levels of the social order on attitudes regarding violence. Additional factors operate at individual, organizational, community, or societal levels in particular, although their influence may overlap across multiple levels. They proposed five ways of approaching the problem but none are possible as a disciplinary response. They require, although they don’t call it as such, transdisciplinary problem solving. We have paraphrased them as: