Covid-19 and violence against women and children: time to mitigate the shadow pandemic.

Covid-19 has highlighted the urgency of addressing violence against women and children, which reports suggest has increased during the pandemic. Often referred to as a “shadow pandemic,”1 the rise in violence over the past two years has been linked to lockdowns and other restrictions on movement put in place due to covid-19, which force women and children to remain at home with their abusers. Violence against women and girls was already a huge global problem before the pandemic. However, for many years it was largely invisible within national and international statistics and surveillance systems. Data from just before the pandemic showed that more than 640 million women worldwide aged 15 and older have been subjected to intimate partner violence at least once in their lifetime (26% of partnered women aged 15 and older).2 Twenty two per cent of partnered women living in the “least developed countries” had experienced it in the past 12 months—substantially higher than the world average of 13%.2 For a variety of reasons, the jump in …