How Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Increase Salience of Intimate Partner Violence on the Policy Agenda?

Belgian authorities, like most authorities in European countries, resorted to unprecedented measures in response to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 and May 2022. This exceptional context highlighted the issue of intimate partner violence (IPV) in an unprecedented way. At a time when many other issues are being put on hold, IPV is being brought to the fore. This article investigated the processes that have led to increasing political attention to domestic violence in Belgium. To this end, a media analysis and a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted. The mate... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Luce Lebrun
Aline Thiry
Catherine Fallon
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
Reihe/Periodikum: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Vol 20, Iss 4461, p 4461 (2023)
Verlag/Hrsg.: MDPI AG
Schlagwörter: intimate partner violence / COVID-19 / agenda-setting / Belgium / violence against women / lockdown / Medicine / R
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26974807
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20054461

Belgian authorities, like most authorities in European countries, resorted to unprecedented measures in response to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 and May 2022. This exceptional context highlighted the issue of intimate partner violence (IPV) in an unprecedented way. At a time when many other issues are being put on hold, IPV is being brought to the fore. This article investigated the processes that have led to increasing political attention to domestic violence in Belgium. To this end, a media analysis and a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted. The materials, collected and analyzed by mobilizing the framework of Kingdon’s streams theory, allowed us to present the agenda-setting process in its complexity and the COVID-19 as a policy window. The main policy entrepreneurs were NGOs and French-speaking feminist women politicians. Together, they rapidly mobilized sufficient resources to implement public intervention that had already been proposed in the preceding years, but which had been waiting for funding. By doing so, they responded during the peak of the pandemic to requests and needs that had already been expressed in a “non-crisis” context.