With surges in calls to domestic abuse hotlines now reported by news media in every region of the world, the link between COVID-19 and gender-based violence is now widely recognised. The new pandemic is shining a spotlight on a much older ‘shadow pandemic’ and importantly, increasing popular understandings of survivors’ experiences and the need for better services. For the most part however, the women we picture in lockdown with abusers are adults. Few imagine a girl married too young, a girl at risk of FGM as school closures mean her absence will no longer be noticed, or girls with disabilities and living in refugee camps for whom already hard-to-reach services have been interrupted by the virus.
New and old pandemics - a 'perfect storm'
COVID-19 is exposing and exacerbating the inequalities that have always put women and girls at risk of gender-based violence. 120 million girls worldwide (almost 1 in 10) have experienced rape or other forms of sexual violence, the most common perpetrators of which are current or former husbands, partners, or boyfriends. Containment measures, and the economic impacts of COVID-19 have reduced access to formal and informal protections, including schools, and are increasing pressure to engage in harmful coping mechanisms.
Before COVID-19, around twelve million girls were married each year. It is now estimated that as many as 4 million additional cases of child marriage will occur in the next two years and two million additional cases of FGM are expected in the next decade. In half of the countries where FGM is prevalent, the majority of girls are cut by age five, in the remaining countries, most girls are cut by their fourteenth birthday. The latest reports from areas affected by humanitarian crises show increases in gender-based violence, and sexual exploitation in exchange for essential goods. In Venezuela femicides have increased by 65%.
Adolescent girls at heightened risk - Hibo's story
Yet many of the impacts of COVID-19 on girls’ safety will not be immediate. Seventeen-year-old Hibo* (pictured above) wants to become an aeroplane engineer when she finishes school. Two months after her school and others across Somalia closed to contain the virus, her parents decided she was ‘better off getting married’. With the help of her headmaster, Hibo was able to persuade her parents to cancel her marriage but still fears that the longer schools stay closed, the harder it will be to convince her parents she should stay unmarried. ‘For now I am safe’ she says ‘but I don’t know for how long before another man comes with another proposal’.
Other girls in Hibo’s community have already been married or become pregnant. As financial and food insecurity increases, pressure on families to marry daughters to decrease the number of children they need to provide for will also grow. Too often, these adolescent girls fall through the cracks between services designed for child protection and gender-based violence services primarily used by adults. In April, the UN Secretary-General extended his call for a global ceasefire during the pandemic to violence against women and girls in the home, and made a series of recommendations for implementation through national response plans.
How to #ProtectaGeneration of girls from gender-based violence
National response plans must be designed with adolescent girls to meet their specific needs. Yet to-date, funding and action has failed to match bold rhetoric. The new brief from our campaign to #ProtectaGeneration, Beyond the Shadow Pandemic makes concrete recommendations to policy-makers including donors, UN and humanitarian actors, national governments and the media to ensure that risk factors for gender-based violence against girls are prevented, mitigated against, and responded to through COVID-19 to recovery.
