Domestic Violence Is a Significant Public Health and a Health Administration Issue in the U.S.

Introduction

Domestic violence is a significant healthcare problem affecting more than 10 million people in the United States and millions more globally each year (Huecker et al., 2022). The many faces of domestic violence are revealed as intimate partner violence (IPV), family violence, and emotional, psychological, sexual, and economic abuse, and are often difficult for healthcare providers, teachers, and friends and family to recognize, often leaving the victim isolated and alone (Huecker et al., 2022; Huecker and Smock, 2019; Houston, 2015; Usher et al., 2020). According to Houston (2015), terminology can evoke inferences, which can suggest that the phenomenon does not pertain to cultural and social influences. Such connotations can imply family dysfunction, discouraging individuals from seeking help, and can limit the scope of the problem for researchers and service providers (Finley, 2020). Houston (2015) recognized the implication of family dysfunction and realized that the terminology can discourage survivors of abuse from utilizing services under the most “normal” of circumstances.

The world’s “normal” changed seemingly overnight in late 2019 with the COVID-19 pandemic. Individuals, families, businesses, schools, and governments were mostly unprepared for the world to essentially shut down. While the shut-down impacted everyone in one way or another, victims of domestic violence and abuse disparately impacted compared to their non-abused peers. The isolation and decreased ability to interact with non-abusive peers and family members due to the closure of schools and in-person work, left many victims of abuse in much more precarious, dangerous, and sometimes devastating situations (Kofman and Garfin, 2020; Mucci et al., 2020; Wong et al., 2021). With the economic and infrastructure shut-down caused by COVID-19 pandemic, victims of domestic violence experienced limited access to care, reduced reprieve from the abuse, and faltering hope (Feder et al., 2021). For example, during the COVID-19 shut down, Australia experienced a 5% increase in domestic violence emergency calls and a 75% increase in Google searches related to domestic abuse (Usher et al., 2020). In China, the Wuhan province saw domestic abuse cases increase threefold in February 2020 compared to the same time the previous year (Usher et al., 2020). In the United States, during the month of February 2020, the National Domestic Violence Hotline received more than 74,000 contacts (calls, chats, and texts), which is the highest number of monthly contacts in its 25-year history (National Domestic Violence Hotline, 2020) and June 2020 saw an 80% increase in contact (Kelly, 2022). The significant uptick in reported domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic led the United Nations to dub it the “Shadow Pandemic” (2020) and the BBC to call it the “epidemic beneath the pandemic” (Kelly and Graham, 2022). The American Journal of Emergency Medicine reports that there was an increase in cases of domestic violence globally from 25% to 33% in 2020 (Jones, 2021). The short- and long-term impacts on victims of domestic abuse due to the COVID-19 pandemic are still surfacing, driving healthcare experts to seek solutions to better support victims in the post-pandemic world.