For the past week, I, like many other workers in this country, have been working from home in a bid to slow the spread of COVID-19 in our communities. I have to admit that I have had many apprehensions about being stuck at home. For one, despite me having a great home life, I am not the type of person who goes home to unwind.
As I have seen all of my favourite restaurants, pubs and music venues shut their doors with social media announcements geared to make me weep, I have felt an incredible sense of foreboding. What if these places, and the people who make them, don’t survive the financial impacts of this pandemic and we never get them back?
As a freelance writer but one with another stable form of employment, I have seen so many other freelancers who don’t have this safety net — whether they be writers, musicians, actors — concerned about their future and how they are going to get through these trying months. I believe everything will come back eventually but I am worried about the artists in our communities and how creativity will fall by the wayside when it precisely what so many of us need to keep us engaged at this drab and scaled down time.
I have another massive concern though. While there have been endless social media posts, political campaigns and the like about staying safe by staying at home, I have been concerned about the many people who are not safe at home and what this may mean to them. What will this mean for the woman who’s been living with a domestic violence perpetrator for years? Or for children whose parents abuse and neglect them? Will the increased policing of social distancing succeed mainly in harming these people?
Though the rights of domestic and family violence victims are never far from my mind, I’m perhaps pondering this issue because I feel it’s a particularly raw time. It was, after all, only a couple of weeks ago that the nation was horrified by the murders of Hannah Clarke and her children. People all of a sudden were discussing domestic and family violence in a way I have rarely heard, possibly because the extreme circumstances of crime meant there were no feasible way Hannah could be blamed for the attack upon herself. There was an absence of victim-blaming for a change and instead many overdue calls to action to get rid of this scourge on our society.
The message changed swiftly as the new threat from this major pandemic loomed. In my four decades of life, I have lived through many pandemics but never have I seen this type of response to one occur. Given my own health situation (despite being a middle-aged Aboriginal woman, I am in good health with no known comorbidities and I live in an area with excellent access to health services), I’m still in the somewhat privileged position of finding this different response difficult to comprehend. I do, however, unfortunately know what it’s like to feel unsafe at home and I began to worry what some outcomes may be for others who know this fear only too well.
'We are in a time were we need to actively look out for each other and take care of the most vulnerable in our society.'
I was not surprised, for example, for reports to start circulating from family violence organisations stating that abusers had been using fake coronavirus diagnoses as a way of forcing their victims to stay within the confines of the home. I was equally not surprised to hear that there had been an increase in reports of domestic violence during this time. Similar reports have come out of France where incidences rose 32 per cent in one week, the UK, Malaysia and other countries. We can only assume domestic violence will continue to escalate in this environment and we need to ensure support exists for those who need to run.
I was encouraged firstly, to see the Prime Minister commit funds to assisting those struggling under these types of circumstances, and secondly, to see a commitment made from the WA government that emergency hotel accommodation they had made available to homeless people in a bid to halt the spread of COVID-19 via their 'Hotels with Heart' initiative may also be available to people escaping family violence situations.
Yet by the same token, the federal government had already stripped funding from multiple domestic and family violence support services so will these crisis time commitments even remotely make up this shortfall? It’s also hard to see the move in WA as being entirely positive when this is a state which still locks up poor, mainly Indigenous, domestic violence victims who call for assistance and are found to have outstanding fines.
One woman per week dies in this country at the hand of a current or former partner. I am concerned that these statistics are going to escalate in an environment where leaving the house is questioning if it is perceived to be 'unnecessary'. Will we leave our homes at the end of the COVID-19 threat to find that the casualties include a number of women and children who died due to the confinement rather than the disease they were locked up for? I sincerely hope not.
We are in a time were we need to actively look out for each other and take care of the most vulnerable in our society. Immunocompromised people need the rest of us to ensure we are doing everything we can to prevent the virus spreading. But while we’re doing that, we also need to ensure that other vulnerable populations have the care and support they need to also survive this crisis. Let’s use this time of heightened community responsibility to ensure we do take care of each other in every way possible.
Celeste Liddle is a trade unionist, a freelance opinion writer and social commentator. She blogs at Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist.
Main image: Mother with her baby in a car (globalmoments/Getty Images)