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"Safer at Home." It's a slogan of choice for the mandatory confinement measures aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus. However, it's not true for everyone.
As the world's families hunker down, there's another danger, less obvious but just as insidious, that worries advocates and officials: a potential spike in domestic violence as victims spend day and night trapped at home with their abusers, with tensions rising, nowhere to escape, limited or no access to friends or relatives - and no idea when it will end.
"An abuser will use anything in their toolbox to exert their power and control, and COVID-19 is one of those tools," said Crystal Justice, who oversees development at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, a 24/7 national hotline in the United States.
In cities and towns everywhere, concern is high, and meaningful numbers are hard to come by. In some cases, officials worry about a spike in calls, and in others, about a drop in calls, which might indicate victims cannot find a safe way to reach out for help.
On a normal day, 1,800-2,000 people will call that national hotline. That number hasn't changed, but that doesn't surprise organizers. After natural disasters like earthquakes, Justice said, it's only when schools and workplaces reopen that people are finally able to reach out.
More significant, she said, is more than 700 people who called the hotline between last Wednesday and Sunday cited the coronavirus as "a condition of their experience." Some of the out-of-the-ordinary anecdotes staffers are hearing include abusers preventing their partners from going to their jobs in health care, or blocking them from needed health care services or from accessing safety tools like gloves or sanitizer.
In Los Angeles, officials have been bracing for a spike in abuse.
"When cabin fever sets in, give it a week or two, people get tired of seeing each other, and then you might have domestic violence," said Alex Villanueva, the sheriff of Los Angeles County.
"We started getting on this as soon as we started seeing the handwriting on the wall," said Patti Giggans, executive director of the nonprofit Peace Over Violence in Los Angeles.
Before the statewide lockdown, the nonprofit began preparing online counseling sessions and reaching out to clients to suggest ways to keep in contact - perhaps phone calls to counselors from a bathroom or during a walk, if an abuser is in the home.
In one recent case, Giggans said a woman showed up at the emergency room after a domestic violence incident, and Peace Over Violence staff had to talk to her over the phone to get her to safety in another county.
Because of virus measures, advocates "can't show up at the police station now. We can't show up at the hospital," Giggans said. She said her staff has been told shelters are taking people's temperatures when they show up. The shelters are also working on plans to limit the proximity of people, in order to maintain social distancing, she said.
Such conditions are also an issue in Illinois, where shelters, already at capacity, were moving beds further apart to follow CDC guidelines.
"One of the key challenges of this health pandemic is that home isn't a safe place for everyone," said Amanda Pyron, executive director of The Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence, based in Chicago. "Victims and the abusers have to stay at the scene of the crime."
The group helps run a statewide 24-hour hotline, which has seen a spike in the average number of daily calls, from about 60 to 90, since confinement orders went into effect last weekend.
Similar concerns have arisen in hard-hit continental Europe. In France, "it's an explosive cocktail," said Nathalie Tomasini, a leading lawyer for domestic violence victims there. Being trapped in an apartment with an abusive partner, she said, is akin to "a prison with no open window."
"Today we're confronted with a form of war," Tomasini said. In wars of the past, "men were on the front. Now they're at home. It's not the same war."
At the National Federation of Women's Solidarity, which runs France's hotline, director Francoise Brie said calls had dropped sharply from the usual 350-400 during the first week of confinement - though it remains too early to measure confinement's precise effects.
"We expect more serious acts, more repeated acts, more numerous," Brie said.
And at the group Women Safe, there's been an uptick in calls. One change, said Frederique Martz, who runs the group is domestic violence victims are no longer being referred to hospitals which "are all saturated" with coronavirus cases.
In addition to intimate partner violence, concerns have also been raised about child abuse. In jurisdictions everywhere, the chief worry is not only that coronavirus tensions could trigger more abuse, but with children out of school, more cases could go unreported or unnoticed.