Practice Note: Domestic Violence Advocacy and Response to Intimate Partner Homicide in the COVID-19 Era

Pandemic Trends

COVID-19 changed the landscape for many frontline domestic violence (DV) service providers. JGCC has seen an overall increase in DV, and in some places and increase in intimate partner homicides, as survivors’ struggles, safety and choices fluctuated, and constricted in phases across the past 2 years of the global pandemic. Particularly at the start of the pandemic, researchers and advocates observed an increase in both the complexity of cases and the severity of violence survivors experienced (Gosangi et al., 2021). These trends emerged both in an increase in number of people screening high risk with DA-LE scores, which represent survivors of domestic violence’ likelihood of near lethal and lethal violence, and is administered by law enforcement officers, and in the frequency of extreme and severe violence in cases referred to JGCC advocates for services. JGCC and community organizations also observed more firearms being used by abusive partners to threaten survivors, a potential outcome of a massive rise in gun purchases during the pandemic and a nationally reported 35% increase in fire-arm related homicides over previous years (Hoops et al., 2020; Kegler et al., 2022; Kerner et al., 2022; Miller et al., 2022).

COVID-19 Impacts on Survivor Decision-making

The increasingly complex violent cases reflect chaotic pandemic circumstances. DV survivors at home in the early days of lockdown dealt with the stress of children, home-schooling, trying to manage work concerns, and worries about their family who were sick, with violence from their partner on top of all of this. Deciding to leave a domestically violent home and relationship and seek help from advocates or the legal system is already a high-risk time for women (Messing et al., 2021). COVID-19 circumstances exacerbated some of the difficulties, with the skyrocketing rental market and maxed out shelter system leaving survivors with nowhere to go for safety. In decision-making about moving out, survivors consider the trade-offs of each decision, their priorities, and what they have to give up to get away, such as gaining physical distance from a violent partner, but losing resources such as a roof over their own and their children’s heads, or obtaining legal advice while maintaining their privacy (Eden et al., 2015; Wood et al., 2021). But in the COVID-19 era, especially before the development of a vaccine, women’s decisions and choices were particularly truncated. Call the police? You were inviting someone into your home that was potentially exposing you and your children to the virus. Going to the hospital for an injury? You were exposing yourself to the virus that you might then bring back to vulnerable people at home. Survivors’ decisions about trade-offs, and analysis of what the safer option would be, became skewed in a complicated gamble between a lethal virus and a violent partner, delaying women’s connecting with DV services, and resulting in women being more likely to remain at home with an abuser (Gosangi et al., 2021).

COVID and Coercion

Advocates also observed abusers using the pandemic as a tactic to isolate, coerce, and harass their partners before and after they have managed to leave the home (Ragavan et al., 2021). Abusive partners that exert power through controlling the household set extreme COVID-19 protocols for their partners and children, and enforced them with violence. As well, practitioners observed violent partners who used court systems to bully and harass their partners used COVID-19 protocols as a way to keep the survivor from seeing their children, claiming that the other parent was not keeping the child safe from the virus. Backlogged courts and systems in various states of disarray meant that these circumstances could not be resolved swiftly with an emergency hearing, with the delay playing into the hands of abusers blocking parental access for the parent seeking safety.

COVID and the Criminal Legal System

COVID-19 changed the way that criminal legal systems operated, first with massive shut-downs in the early weeks of the virus, and then shifting to virtual hearings and a semblance of normality as adjudicators scrambled to address the backlog of cases and the rise in incidences of violence; in some already burdened systems, these backlogs have yet to be resolved. Police departments were stretched thin, with fewer staff to respond to calls and less ability to provide connection to services due to reduced personnel. While advocates often serve as a guide for survivors navigating the systems, helping them access resources and support and pursue the option that they feel is best for them, the pandemic and the havoc that it wreaked on typical system functions left JGCC scrambling to address changing circumstances. The predictability of systems gives survivors a sense of control, and helps them know what they can expect from the system. Where before JGCC’s advocates could give survivors a fairly good sense of system responses if their abuser was arrested, or they filed for divorce, or reported the violation of a restraining order to the police, in the months of early COVID-19 chaos where systems were not operating reliably, there was no guide for what a “typical” case might look like, and no way to give survivors the information and predictability that they needed to make their trade-off decisions. For instance, where before COVID-19 an abuser arrested for an assault might be jailed, giving the survivor time to plan for safety, the move to keep people out of jails to reduce exposure to contagion meant that survivors did not know if their abuser would be kept in jail or come right back home, and risked their partner bringing the virus back home with them after systems contact. Probation officers were not doing home visits, and courts struggled to function in socially distanced and eventually virtual contexts. With everything up in the air, systems and service providers grappled with how to guide and respond adequately to survivors’ safety needs.

COVID and DV Services

Many DV service providers and institutions such as civil and criminal court started to move toward functioning online, rather than in person to reduce risk of contagion. JGCC maintained the DV crisis hotline despite early in-person office closures for staff health, and within a week had direct services up and running via Zoom, with legal services brought online approximately a week later, with counseling and children’ services coming last due to restructuring needs and considerations around licensure and confidentiality. Approximately 3 weeks after widespread COVID-19 shutdowns, JGCC had transitioned almost all in-person services to online, with critical services like the hotline never shutting down.

The shift to virtual service provision necessitated by the pandemic met particular obstacles, but also opened new avenues of connection and advocacy. One example is JGCC’s court-ordered programs for men who use violence that shifted to online groups found that despite the lack of probation officers coming to homes to follow up, and the full system shut-down of the initial lockdown months, there was almost no fall off of group attendance. Participation in the groups maintained during the pandemic, despite the shifted format and the absence of court enforcement. Facilitators found that these men who had used violence and were court ordered to attend were keen for connection during the bleak early months of staying inside, struggling and desperate for a lifeline during that period of time, and that this spurred their participation in the court-ordered groups.

This new heavily virtual space for advocacy and service provision offers both challenges and opportunities to grow and evolve DV work (Garcia et al., 2021). JGCC discovered quickly that many tried-and-true support strategies were inadequate or ill-suited to particulars of pandemic-era DV service provision and advocacy. The swell of demand for services during the pandemic, coupled with increasing severity of cases, necessitated safety plans that accommodate lack of access to practical resources, inability to leave the home, and fear of COVID-19 exposure. A lot of our safety plans that centered around decisions to leave or connect with supportive people outside the home did not apply in the pandemic. Advocates came up with new strategies with survivors focused on different ways to build connections, seek safety, and break the isolation without risking the virus. For instance, advocates working with survivors could help them access resources over their computer in real time, pulling up websites for food banks, helping them apply for benefits directly online while filling out applications, and supporting survivors through each step, improving our case management processes. However, some advocacy strategies that advocates used in the real-world were not available virtually. During a restraining order hearing, advocates would often put themselves between the victim and abuser to interrupt the line of sight, or were able to comfort a victim during a hearing by putting a hand on their shoulder or whispering to them to take a deep breath. In the initial stages of the pandemic, court processes were happening over the phone which limited our ability to provide support for survivors during hearings. As JGCC moved into Zoom court hearings, advocates adapted to using texting as a way to communicate messages of comfort and support during hearings.

It is very hard not to feel isolated during a global pandemic when most of the nation is on lockdown, and this exacerbated the isolation of survivors of abuse. The need for accessible social resources for survivors led service providers to move away from relying on systems, because survivors didn’t want to access systems as much or in as many ways due to threat of COVID-19 from traditional face-to-face support approaches. For some it was about creating communities and connection online because that was their only source of interaction with other people, reaching deeper into dimensions of community that were still accessible despite lockdown. While JGCC advocates still helped survivors identify their support people, our advocates found they had to lean on online connections much more heavily than in pre-pandemic times to help find people in the survivor’s life who could support them and be present for them in a consistent and accessible way during this isolating time.

DVHRTs in the COVID-19 Era

DVHRTs are uniquely positioned to respond effectively not just to severe urgent issues of domestic violence, but also to the disrupting and chaotic circumstances of the early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite COVID-19s chaotic destabilization of systems, DVHRTs continued to come together virtually to talk about cases and system responses regularly throughout the pandemic. This both served to move individual cases forward toward safety, and enabled each participating institution or organization to keep up to date on changing systemic responses and better understand how each system was functioning during these unprecedented times. While advocates are adapting and shifting to meet COVID-19-specific needs in our own service delivery, these consistent meetings helped JGCC staff learn about and calibrate our own collaboration to best work with other systems’ updates and changing practices that impact survivors. With DVHRT meetings as a consistent site of connection through early weeks of the pandemic, members were able to bring this information back to their “home organization.” DVHRTs are already a mechanism for information sharing, understanding, and collaborative action, and by continuing to bring people together through the pandemic, they helped each organization collaborate, and meet their commitments to survivors’ needs.

The COVID-19 chaos resulted in court backlogs, changes in arrest decisions, bail considerations, and other criminal legal case decisions and made systems navigation complicated. Survivors were making difficult decisions about what was safe and was not safe, and advocates and service providers seeking to guide and support them depended on up-to-date information so that each could make the best choices for themselves and their own priorities. However, with the changing environment, this was often new territory for advocates as well. While before the pandemic, advocates might have known how a survivor’s decision would play out in the criminal legal system and be able to give survivors this information so that a survivor could make an informed choice, due to the unprecedented nature of the pandemic, advocates could not be confident about how decisions would work with systems in upheaval.

DVHRT teams, previously established to fill the gaps that survivors fall into and provide continuity across cases, were able to move together with their shared knowledge and established inter-institutional trust relationships to address these even larger challenges that COVID-19 produced for survivors. When systems work together and are transparent about their function and the resources that they can offer, a new option emerges that wouldn’t be there if they were working separately. For instance, during case discussion at a DVHRT meeting, probation officers looked up the offender’s record in the system and discovered a recent felony where the sentence had been entered incorrectly and no time was served. A series of communications followed amongst team members, including an advocate in the DA’s Office, corrections, the prosecutor who handled the case and other court personnel, which allowed them to confirm the error. The defendant was taken into custody soon after. Further investigation identified that this was a systemic gap the DVHRT has been able to correct. Together these DVHRTs innovate and brainstorm new ways to keep people safe in each particular individual circumstance. Because of the foundation of collaboration, communication, and commitment to a shared goal, DVHRTs are able to troubleshoot and respond swiftly address increasingly severe and complex cases of escalating violence.

Adapting DVHRTs to function virtually is key. With information being so scattered during the pandemic it is even more critical that DVHRT remain connected to share information for case decision-making. They need to have that trust and inter-systems cohesion established to be truly effective. Those relationships and those connections are what DVHRTs use to hold that safety net together for survivors. It’s hard to get a representative from prosecutors’ offices, probation offices, parole, and DV advocates to all set aside this time for high-risk team meetings. While DVHRTs were previously established with in-person meetings and trainings, DVHRTs in the COVID-19 era have had to rely on virtual connections. With the virtual meetings the ability to attend consistently actually went up, and many teams are going to continue virtually or at least offer the virtual option. An additional benefit to virtual meetings is that partners had instant access to case level information as they could access their agency’s data systems. This further increased information sharing among partner organizations. Initially, JGCC was concerned with this shift to virtual meetings for DVHRTs, because we believe so much in the trust that needs to be built in a multidisciplinary team and we were worried that this trust-building wouldn’t happen with the teams that meet virtually. But DVHRT meeting attendance is up, and with the virtual option, people are able to participate more regularly. DVHRT have gotten more efficient through virtual conferencing, and teams are doing more communication between meetings, which can make a big difference. In the wake of the first waves of the pandemic, people are seeing the need for more cross-agency communication, and our DVHRTs are a great way to set up these relationships.

A Future of DV Advocacy

Changing risks for survivors call for changing resources. DV advocates need to be able to adjust the focus of programs, and be ready to hear what the community needs, in terms of flexible funding for survivors’ practical needs. This could mean developing virtual service provision, or resources going toward survivors’ immediate needs such as utility payments, relocation costs, medical needs, and childcare. DV advocacy and service organizations have seen funder receptiveness to pandemic-responsive shifts in how their resources are used, and are more willing to follow the identified needs in the community rather than a pre-set agenda. Further, JGCC found that funders are willing to trust service providers and support their commitment to shaping community-focused services.

Advocates and communities have all exercised our innovation muscles so much to imagine how support could look different. This might mean moving outside of geographically specific services, blurring the lines of location if you’re serving survivors virtually. Providing virtual services reduces disruption to survivors’ jobs so they no longer need to travel for services, reduces need to find childcare, and makes everything most accessible to those who need it. It has made JGCC rethink what services mean, who advocates serve, and how survivors are served, and how to provide more options for survivors to access help through text, email, virtual groups, and the less restrictive hours of a robust online presence. These pandemic-era changes system and service provider accessibility have made options available to survivors that maybe wouldn’t have been able to engage them previously, such as homebound survivors who have physical disabilities limiting their ability to get into the office and court, or people needing language services. Our organization doesn’t think we could ever go back to not offering virtual services because this has changed the level of accessibility so significantly.

As technical assistance providers, JGCC likes to spend time in the communities where the models are being implemented to help customize approaches to each community. One of the reasons why the DVHRT model may have been successful is because it is designed to be customized by the community. Before the pandemic, JGCC would typically be in the community at least three times during an implementation process, and that time onsite taught JGCC technical assistance providers a lot about the communities that the DVHRT is developed in. When COVID-19 hit and everything went into lock-down, JGCC had to forgo that in-person part and start doing everything virtually. From shifting to online, JGCC learned that most of the DVHRT trainings can be delivered virtually and also that a virtual implementation naturally required more of the community to lead the implementation of the model, rather than our organization. The DVHRT model works best when it is driven by the community, particularly when the community spends a good amount of time in the early stages getting buy-in from the criminal legal system and the community partners in the decision to use and customize the DVHRT model to their community.

Before the pandemic, JGCC staff spent a lot of time in airports and hotels, traveling to implementation sites, but with the shift to virtual, and having the community drive the model, we’ve realized how much more advocates can do when we’re not utilizing so much of our resources for this. It’s been pretty effective to train communities online and with the resources that JGCC saves from not spending so much time traveling we’re able to get more training out to communities. That has been a huge learning for us, and has shifted the way we’re thinking about delivering technical support for DVHRTs going forward after the pandemic.

Conclusions

The pandemic was particular difficult for survivors of domestic violence. COVID-19 highlighted the risk of harm that survivors manage, and illustrated how survivors are always considering other threats to their wellbeing and weighing other trade-offs in addition to the risk of lethality from a violent relationship. The pandemic helped identify the importance of having risk assessment instruments that pull forward those most dangerous cases, particularly during times when in systems are so overwhelmed. Having DVHRTS function as a communication mechanism on the most severe DV cases in the chaos of COVID-19 demonstrated the importance of enhanced information-sharing in order to take effective action to prevent harm to survivors of DV. These DVHRTs serve as both a bridge for continued communication, and a model for how communities can effectively work around large-scale disruptions. The pandemic required innovation from DV advocates and organizations that participated in DVHRTs that served to strengthen both the teams and the accessibility of services provided. Continuing to develop inter-institutional relationships and facilitate communication among service providers has the potential to make systems engagement safer and more effective for many DV survivors. In addition to the changes toward virtual services and online collaboration that advocates see going forward, it remains urgent to expand conversation opportunities for risk assessment and new pathways to safety outside of the criminal legal response and to invest in communities that are already developing effective solutions.