Disruption, adaptation, and maintenance of domestic violence services during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract
COVID-19 disrupted many aspects of domestic violence services including sheltering, in-person advocacy, and access to mental health, visitation, and legal services. Increased demand for services occurred concurrent with the highest levels of pandemic disruptions. Adaptations to many systems and services were made to address survivor’s changing needs. To understand how various aspects of service provision were disrupted during the pandemic, we surveyed a national census of U.S. based domestic violence direct service agencies. Email addresses were collected from online directories and each agency received a link to complete a survey using the online platform Qualtrics. The survey included five sections: services provided; work environment during COVID-19; disruptions caused by COVID-19; personal and organizational disaster preparedness; and demographics. Twenty-two percent of 1,341 agencies responded to the survey. At the start of the pandemic, the most disrupted services were legal and court, sheltering, and mental health/counselling services. Hazard pay, flexible scheduling, and additional information technology support were most frequently mentioned supports provided to mitigate disruptions and support providers and advocates. Disruptions and supports changed over the course of the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the provision of services and advocacy to victims and survivors of domestic violence. Adaptations were made as new control measures were available (e.g. vaccines) and lessons learned were identified (e.g. successful implementation of virtual legal and court services). Maintaining supportive measures post-pandemic will require continued investment in this chronically underfunded, yet critical, sector and applying lessons learned from COVID-19 related disruptions and adaptations.
Description
This article was originally published in Critical Public Health. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2024.2336580. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords
domestic violence, emergency, pandemic, advocacy, adaptations, gender equality, peace, justice, and strong institutions
Citation
Horney, J. A., Pena, A., Scales, S. E., Fleury-Steiner, R. E., Camphausen, L. C., & Miller, S. L. (2024). Disruption, adaptation, and maintenance of domestic violence services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Critical Public Health, 34(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2024.2336580