All around the country, we’re seeing the stark impact Covid-19 has had on victims of intimate and sexual violence. When five centers offering assistance to domestic violence victims closed in New York, the city’s website saw a huge spike in visits by people seeking help.
Services that women once depended on, like shelters and emergency rooms, are not as accessible as they were before the pandemic, a fact that has left victims of domestic and sexual abuse even more vulnerable. And all around the country, we’re seeing the stark impact that Covid-19 has already had on victims of intimate and sexual violence.
When five centers offering assistance to domestic violence victims closed in New York, for example, the city’s website saw a huge spike in visits by people seeking help. And in Northern California, fears over victims not reporting their rapes sparked some authorities to allow rape survivors to conduct their own evidence collection kits.
“The last thing we want is a victim not reporting the assault to law enforcement because they’re worried about getting sick,” Monterey County Deputy District Attorney Lana Nassoura told the Associated Press, “so we wanted to give them an option to be able to do that without those concerns.”
The issue with at-home rape kits, of course, is whether or not they’ll hold up in court — defense attorneys could take issue with the chain of evidence, for example. When DIY rape kit companies tried to sell their products online last year, sexual assault advocacy organizations spoke up against them and several state attorneys general wrote cease and desist letters to the companies. The concern was that the companies were giving victims the false impression that their kits would be admissible in court. Now, though, we may have to accept that at-home evidence collection is better than nothing.
In California — and any other states or counties that follow suit — at least DIY kits will be supervised by a nurse, with a police officer waiting to collect the kit outside the victim’s home, making admissibility slightly more likely.
Violence against women has always been difficult in America — whether because of victim-blaming and disbelief, rape kit backlogs, or how the criminal justice system neglects to punish abusers. The extra burden of a pandemic adds a whole new layer of complications.
But the coronavirus’s impact on sexual assault and violence survivors goes beyond emergency room availability and shelter closures. And unless we start to get creative and proactive, the already-difficult issues around protecting victims will only get harder.