My wedding anniversary (which I try to forget but is branded into my brain) was last month, and when it rolled around this year, all I could think was how damn grateful I was that I am divorced from my horrible abusive ex-husband, because the surefire hell that would be my life if I were trapped inside somewhere with him during this pandemic is something I do not even want to contemplate. What would happen (and is happening) to abused women (and children) throughout this country was one of the first things that I worried about when the (absolutely necessary) shutdowns began.
Abusers — even one like mine, who confined most of his abuse to screaming tantrums, name-calling, belittling and blaming — are live-in terrorists. Because you can never be sure what will set them off, you’re never sure of yourself. And whatever it is that finally does —because there always is something— it will be your fault.
This is deliberate, of course. The more unbalanced your life is, the less likely it is that you’ll find a way to leave. Imagine the mental and emotional ataxia of coping with this without a job to go to — and without having him out of the house at a job — in the middle of a pandemic.
Many of our sisters are.
As countries around the world have tracked Covid-19, they’ve seen a sharp spike in another scourge, one of far longer duration and with no known cure: domestic violence. In the last weeks and months, confinement necessitated by the pandemic has caused an increase in calls to police and crisis centers, reporting severe beatings and murder-suicides in the home.
At the beginning of April, for example, in a Chicago suburb, a fifty-four-year-old man convinced that his girlfriend had contracted the virus (she had not) shot her in the head, then killed himself. In the US, calls are pouring into the National Domestic Violence Hotline, whose chief executive told The New York Times, “We’re having really difficult conversations,” advising women to sleep in their cars to escape violent partners and, during arguments, to stay out of dangerous spaces, such as kitchens and bathrooms.
In Argentina, Femicides have reached a ten-year high.
And all over the United States, adults and children have been quarantined with people who hurt them:
It’s hard to imagine a set of circumstances that would facilitate abuse so much as the ones we’ve been living under. For one thing, people are stressed. They’re getting sick, losing loved ones, or worrying about getting sick or losing loved ones. The income loss many have experienced only adds to the daily anxiety. Plus, school cancellations mean that many parents have lost their regular affordable child care. Financial strain has been linked to increases in the frequency and severity of domestic abuse, and a 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 25 percent increase in child neglect and a 12 percent increase in physical abuse, one study found. Other research has suggested that the stress from catastrophic events like natural disasters can also increase the risk of domestic and family violence. All of this adds up to a potentially dangerous situation for those who live with their abusers—even before you consider the current lockdown protocols.
Many have lost their lives:
Maria Pew was murdered in late April amid concerns over domestic violence during the pandemic. Her husband is in jail accused of the crime. NBC News reached out to 35 organizations in 19 states, and found that calls for help to hotlines have more than doubled in some places, becoming shorter and more frantic.
This is happening all over the world:
Spain has seen an 18 percent rise in calls to hotlines; the UK, 20 percent. French police have reported a 30 percent rise in calls. In Italy, hotel rooms had to be requisitioned when shelters were shut down. The United Nations has called for governments to “put women’s safety first.”
But that has never happened in any country, crisis or no crisis.
And heaven knows, the current White House occupant — who openly stalked Hillary Clinton on a debate stage, on live television, during the campaign — is not only not interested in violence (and threats of violence) against women, but is an active enabler of it.
The horror show in Lansing, Michigan was not organic. It didn’t happen because average Michiganders were pissed off about not being able to buy garden tools or get a haircut. This happened because the Occupant took umbrage after Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer criticized his failed leadership.
This was, of course, her fault. It always is.
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The Secretaries of State in Nevada and Michigan who had the temerity to send out applications for absentee ballots? He accused them of “illegal” behavior (which it was not). Other Secretaries of State sent out applications, too, but they weren’t Democrats . . . or, coincidentally of course, women.
They brought those tweets upon themselves, you see.
Just like the women at the mall in Glendale, Arizona where an angry guy with a gun decided to resolve his rage against women who wouldn’t date him by shooting up the place.
“During Armando Hernandez's initial court appearance on Thursday, Maricopa County prosecutors said that the 20-year-old 'self-professed' to being an Incel.
“Prosecutors said that Hernandez shot up the Westgate Entertainment District in Glendale on Wednesday evening because he was 'taking out his expressed anger with society.'
'The feeling that women don't want him,' prosecutors added, according to a clip obtained by 12 News.”
This is actually a thing. Canadian law enforcement this week charged a teenager with “incel terrorism.”
Police in Canada have charged a teenager accused of stabbing a woman to death in a massage parlor not just with murder, but with committing an act of terrorism, because the suspect (who cannot be named because he is 17) identified with “incel” ideology. The move to add the charge is being considered the first-ever instance of “incel terrorism,” and could signal a wider shift in Canada and beyond to tackle an uptick in gender-based violent attacks.
The teenager is accused of barging into a Toronto massage parlor in February with a machete, killing 24-year-old Ashley Noelle Arzaga and injuring two others. At first, the suspect was charged with first-degree and attempted murder, but on May 19, authorities upgraded the charges to “murder — terrorist activity” based on his ties to the incel movement, a largely online, loosely connected group of men that blame women for their grievances surrounding romantic and sexual rejection. It is the first time that the incel ideology has been connected to the legal concept of terrorism, which is most often applied to religious extremists. It’s only the second time, in Canada, that terrorism charges have been filed against someone for activities not tied to Al Qaeda or inspired by the Islamic State.
Incel violence is “indisputably terroristic in that it seeks to repress and subjugate women as part of the incels’ vision of a paternalistic, genderized society,” according to Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware of the Council on Foreign Relations.
“By advocating bloodshed as a means of broader societal intimidation, incel ideology conforms to the core definition of terrorism as violence designed to have far-reaching psychological effects,” they wrote.
For background on the toxic ideology behind this: The New Statesman
And here we are.
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From April:
An official at the U.S. Department of Justice is warning of an increase in domestic violence due to the wave of recent gun-buying spurred by the coronavirus pandemic, echoing concerns advocates have raised for weeks.
“A recent surge in gun sales has increased already rising concerns among those of us working to protect people from domestic violence and sexual assault due to the already tense situations that may become more dangerous with a (new) firearm in the house,” Laura L. Rogers, the acting director of the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women, wrote in a statement posted to the DOJ’s website.
Nice thought. Of course, all those gun sales were possible because . . . oh, never mind.
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Our formal economy is only possible because it’s subsidized by women’s unpaid work.
— Nahla Valji, the senior gender adviser to the Secretary General of the United Nations
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The financial toll on women during the pandemic has been especially brutal.
The coronavirus has worsened existing social and economic inequalities, especially for women.
While both women and men are suffering the economic fallout of the virus across the world, it is women — already more likely to be in poverty than men, already more likely to be earning a smaller paycheck, already with less savings, already more likely to be in precarious jobs — who are being disproportionately squeezed.
Add to that, the next-to-invisible but overwhelming burden of unpaid labor, the bulk of which is shouldered by women in every country in the world.
Crises amplify existing inequalities, and so across the world women are being affected more severely by the socioeconomic impacts of this pandemic. This is because in every country women earn less, they save less, they’re more likely to be in precarious jobs with little security or protections if they do work, or in the informal sector, with no protections at all. And that means that they have less buffer to economic shocks, such as the ones we are experiencing.
Those on the lowest rungs of the pay scale —women who work in meat processing plants, for example, or domestic workers — are, of course, facing more than just financial anxiety. They are also facing heightened risks of infection and death.
This is what one nanny told New York magazine:
I’m from St. Vincent. I came to this country about 14 years ago. Before the coronavirus, I was taking care of a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old. Then when I went in on a Monday morning, the bosses, who are both lawyers, said they were going to stay home and they would contact me to let me know what’s going on. I took it for granted because a lot of other nannies, their bosses are sending their money to their homes. But then they paid me the first week, and that’s it. I had to file unemployment.
I put my everything into taking care of these kids. So at least parents should see that and appreciate it without having to remind them. This is a crisis. And if it wasn’t for this crisis, I would be at work. Still, I’m not going to reach out to them, because why did other employers find it in their heart to pay me?
(snip)
I have a 14-year-old son. I have to pay rent. It’s hard. It’s really, really hard. Now I just try and follow instructions and stay home. Everybody wants to live, so you just have to comply with the rules.
My very good friend of about 35 years, Jenna Layne, passed away from the coronavirus. She was working as a nanny on the East Side of Manhattan. We were really, really close.
(snip)
A lot of nannies from the Caribbean have died. We have a nannies group, and they would post the people. It’s about ten to 15 from the Caribbean. A lot of them had to go into work, and that’s one of the reasons why I think so many of them lost their lives.
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The unpaid work shouldered by women is costing society in so many ways. Since the pandemic began, many women scientists have had to cut back on the research they were doing.
Quarantined with a six-year-old child underfoot, Megan Frederickson wondered how academics were managing to write papers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns implemented to stem coronavirus spread meant that, overnight, many households worldwide had become an intersection of work, school and home life. Conversations on Twitter seemed to confirm Frederickson’s suspicions about the consequences: female academics, taking up increased childcare responsibilities, were falling behind their male peers at work.
But Frederickson, an ecologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, wanted to see what the data said. So, she looked at preprint servers to investigate whether women were posting fewer studies than they were before lockdowns began. The analysis— and several others — suggests that, across disciplines, women’s publishing rate has fallen relative to men’s amid the pandemic.
To the surprise of no one.
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Resonant right now:
An Exhibition (available online) of Dorothea Lange’s Great Depression photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art ~ Dorothea Lange Words & Pictures.
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And this. Just because.
A few days a week, a woman arrives at the Metropolitan Plant and Flower Exchange — a squat, lime-green bunker along Route 17 North in Paramus, New Jersey. They know her there by her hospital scrubs.
She picks up her standing order: yellow daffodils. If there aren’t any daffodils, she’ll take carnations — yellow, please. That’s the most important part — bright yellow.
She brings the flowers with her to work at Hackensack University Medical Center. They aren’t for her office. They’re not for co-workers or patients. She carries them out back and walks into a parking garage.
Her name is Tanisha Brunson-Malone, 41, a forensic technician at the hospital’s morgue.
(snip)
Where there would normally be parked cars, there are now three long trailers, with loud motors powering their refrigerators.
Inside each trailer are bodies in body bags, stacked on shelves three high, coronavirus victims awaiting pickup.
Brunson-Malone enters each trailer and walks the aisle between the rows, pausing at each new body bag. There, she carefully places a flower on top.
(snip)
Her flowers are for the dead alone, a fleeting brush with dignity and decorum on the way from one sad place to another.
As always, this week’s diary was a group effort. Thanks to my sisters SandraLLAP, elenacarlena, mettle fatigue and ramara for their contributions.
