The Shadow Pandemic: COVID-19 and the Rise of GBV

Gender-based violence (GBV) has intensified since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the reasons why we have witnessed this rise is perhaps because of the Male Loneliness Epidemic, which could provide a framework for understanding the media landscape that we see today, especially the media that is targeting men and perhaps has contributed to the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2024. 

Because of the pandemic, many men have been unable to form close relationships and has led to increasing feelings of depression and anxiety. As society has often condemned expressions of feelings from men except for violence or anger, many men have turned to social media to express these feelings, creating echo chambers that spread toxic ideas and constructed toxic ideas of masculinity and society that we still see today. The building of these echo chambers on various different social media platforms has led to an increasing radicalization of young men, as we can see from channels such as Sneako or Aiden Ross who have been deplatformed on major social media platforms such as YouTube but who continue to have a huge influence on political discourse through different social media platforms because of their strong and loyal fanbase of men who are usually very young and impressionable.

However, critics of this theory have also argued that this is not the same for other demographics that were also deeply impacted by the pandemic and this excuse might be a way of detracting from conversations about how deep-rooted and systemic gender-based violence is. The reason why this is called a “shadow pandemic” is because GBV has been steadily growing because of the COVID-19 pandemic due to many other issues. People, more disproportionately women, are unable to access their support systems because they have had to stay at home and isolate. Also, because their abusers are perhaps facing economic hardships from being laid off or because they are drinking more because alcohol consumption has increased because of the pandemic, which has affected more and more people during the pandemic, they would be more likely to be violent which exacerbates the problem of intimate partner violence. Later, a lot of social services have started to become overwhelmed or are not allocated sufficient resources to provide adequate support for victims of GBV.

The relationship between COVID-19 and GBV is very complicated, as there are many factors that have contributed to GBV growing in the shadows of COVID-19 as it continues to grow as well, Some of the consequences may still have a large impact on the world that we live in today, and recognizing it would be the first step to coming up with a more long-term solution to GBV that could withstand many changes that we face as a society.

Source:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/global-womens-health/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2020.00004/full

https://www.undp.org/publications/gender-based-violence-and-covid-19

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf5i2cc6-JY

https://www.vox.com/politics/384792/your-body-my-choice-maga-gender-election

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/making-sense-chaos/202005/why-the-increase-in-domestic-violence-during-covid-19