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ABSTRACT
The purpose of this article is to offer a collocation of COVID-19 alongside two adjacent calamities that will likely increase during and after public health responses to the pandemic: suicide and femicide. Both of these forms of violence are patterned and predictable, both of them will manifest in divergent and distinct ways during the chaos of COVID-19, and both are highly gendered. In this article, we characterize the virus, theoretically align suicide and femicide as preventable forms of violence due to the circumstances of the pandemic, and suggest a way forward. We assert that suicide rates will increase for women and girls to unprecedented levels as a direct result of pandemic public health measures and it is also our contention that the gendered impact of COVID-19 will lead to an upsurge in another harm induced by the global health order to stay at home: femicide. In a landscape of competitive catastrophe, we call attention to two social facts that kill: suicide and femicide, and we urge global leaders to attend to prevention now, because for many women and girls, even though we have found a vaccine, it may be too late.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
2. In this period, there were a total of nine attempted suicides and eight actual femicide-suicides (Unpublished statistics, Weil and Keshet).
3. Joiner et al. (Citation2006) considers this assessment low, ‘The best evidence to date indicates that around 95% of those who die by suicide have a diagnosable mental disorder at the time of their death. Personally, I believe that is probably an underestimate, and that the figure is closer to 100% … .’ (p. 89). Others challenge this statistic as it is based on medical records of suicides from existing psychiatric files when most suicides do not seek psychiatric support in advance of deliberate self-killing (Hamdi, Price, Qassem, Amin, & Jones, Citation2008; Shahtahmasebi, Citation2013).
5. According to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report cited above, more than half of the victims of femicide (58%) were killed by intimate partners or other family members (UNODC, Citation2019, p. 10).
11. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-domestic-abuse-uk-killings-women-girls-a9467131.htmhttps://www.scirp.org/pdf/jss_2020102615364048.pdf
12. Unpublished statistics in ongoing research collated by Weil and Keshet.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Katerina Standish
Shalva Weil, D. Phil. is Senior Researcher in the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and a Research Fellow in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies, UNISA. She has published over 100 articles in scientific journals, and edited books (with Routledge, OUP, Marg, Magnes, Palgrave-Macmillan). From 2013-7, Prof. Weil served as Chair of the Cost Action Femicide Across Europe, heading a Management Committee from 30 European countries. In 2018, she co-edited Femicide across Europe (Bristol University Press, Policy). She has co-edited two Special Issues on Femicide in Current Sociology, 2016, and in Qualitative Sociology Review, 2017. Her numerous articles on femicide include Weil, S. and Mitra, N. ‘Femicide of Girls in Contemporary India’. Ex Aequo, 2016; and Weil, S. and Keshet, N.,’Female Geronticide; the case of Israel’, Journal of Gender Studies, 2020.
Shalva Weil
Dr Katerina Standish is Director of Research and Senior Lecturer at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago, in New Zealand. She is the senior editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Positive Peace and the author of numerous articles and books including Suicide Through a Peacebuilding Lens, A coming wave: suicide and gender after COVID-19., COVID-19, suicide, and femicide: Rapid Research using Google search phrases, Cultural Violence and Gender: Peacebuilding via Peace Education, Understanding cultural violence and gender: honour killings; dowry murder; the zina ordinance; and blood feuds, Human Security and Gender: Female suicide Bombers from Palestine and Chechnya, The Female Islamic Combatant, Cultural Violence in the Classroom.