This project brings together researchers in sociology, criminology and creative writing to study gender-based violence (GBV) during the Covid-19 pandemic in relation to ‘immobilities’. This is a term that reflects the ways in which lockdowns restrict our movements and our ability to mix with other people. We are interested in understanding these varying restrictions in a range of spaces, from inside spaces of the home, to streets, workplaces and online spaces.
For us, GBV covers a range of experiences, from physical and sexual harm to the ways we feel about our safety and security in different places. The project combines analysis of existing stories (in the public domain already), from across the UK, with original life writing, photography, comic stories, and other kinds of stories, supported in online workshops and creative writing cafes. Our research values narrative accounts of experiences of GBV at different stages of the pandemic and reveals gender and other (intersectional) inequalities.
The project (AH/V013122/1) is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of UKRI’s Covid-19 funding.
What is gender-based violence?
Gender-based violence (GBV) refers to harmful acts directed at an individual or a group of individuals based on their gender. It is rooted in gender inequality, the abuse of power and harmful norms. The term is primarily used to underscore the fact that structural, gender-based power differentials place women and girls at risk for multiple forms of violence. While women and girls suffer disproportionately from GBV, men and boys can also be targeted. The term is also sometimes used to describe targeted violence against LGBTQI+ populations, when referencing violence related to norms of masculinity/femininity and/or gender norms.
UN Women definition of gender-based violence
Thus, in this project we refer to GBV as acts of physical, emotional, imagined and sexual violence, rape, stalking and harassment.
We know that GBV has changed and is continually changing since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, but we do not know the complexities of how.
GBV has been widely researched, in criminology (e.g. see Oduro et al, 2012; Reina et al, 2014; Postmus et al, 2015), anthropology (e.g. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004) and sociology (e.g. Walby et. al. 2014), but this work has been predominantly aspatial until recently. Recent studies on GBV in public streets (Fileborn, 2018; Vera-Gray 2016); university campuses and colleges (Bows et al. 2015) public transport (Ceccato 2017; Gekoski et al, 2015; Jarrigeon 2012; Lewis 2019; Tillous 2016); and digital/online spaces (Henry and Powell 2018) have, however, tended to concentrate on specific spaces without looking across them.
Why immobilities?
In the context of the Covid-19 lockdown the population have been immobilised in different ways and to different extents. The home has been reconfigured as a space for activities that would otherwise be carried out outside of this space. Other spaces, the workplace and outside space have been similarly reshaped. We refer to scholarship in gender mobilities (Uteng and Cresswell 2008) in understanding these changes.
We recognise ‘the possibility of multiple narratives’ (Massey 2005, 71) – there are disparities between people who are key workers and women who can work from home. Some people who are travelling to work are potentially more vulnerable in public space. In contrast, people who are working from home or not working at all are essentially trapped, or immobilised.
The Covid-19 pandemic creates different questions of the already contested associations between safety and ‘private’ and risky and ‘public’ spaces and GBV. Indeed, whilst domestic spaces have become more constrained, outside spaces became, at the height of the pandemic, more desolate, transformed through lockdown and social distancing, which impacts on the reported felt security from GBV in more ‘busy’ spaces (Lewis 2019).In order to understand the spatialised concept of ‘domestic abuse’ it is necessary to look across the varied spaces of GBV – from the inside spaces like the home to outside ‘public’ spaces and online spaces.
Research methods: Why stories?
This research adopts a transdisciplinary methodological perspective, drawing on sociology, criminology and creative writing scholarship. The methodology builds on research in mobilities (Fincham et al. 2010; Murray and Cortes 2019) the humanities and mobilities (Murray and Overall 2017; Murray and Upstone 2014; Pearce and Merriman 2017) and in criminology and mobilities (Lewis et al. 2019), which centres on the interdependencies of embodied and imagined mobilities. It brings this thinking together with the method of life writing (Moriarty 2020) and narrative analysis (Murray and Khan 2020; Murray and Järviluoma 2019) to seek an alternative understanding of GBV, picking up on nuances that elude quantitative studies.
For us, stories are the key to understanding the immobilities of GBV and their complexity. Narrative methods, in which the story itself as well as its content are under scrutiny, have been part of sociological research since the 1980s (Hyvärinen et al. 2013; Mishler 1986; Lawlor 2002; Riessman 1990). The emphasis is on the ways in which stories are told – how they are sequenced in making sense of aspects of everyday lives – and on the patterns of meaning and practice in stories that further understanding of particular social phenomena (Riessman 1990).
About us
We are an interdisciplinary team of five researchers: Lesley Murray, Associate Professor in sociology in the School of Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton; Jess Moriarty, Principal Lecturer in creative writing in the school of Humanities; Amanda Holt, Reader in criminology at the University of Roehampton and Sian Lewis, Lecturer in criminology at the University of Plymouth; and Mel Parks, writer and researcher at the University of Brighton. We are working with experts in story-writing, creativity and GBV: Hannah Vincent, Miranda Gavin, Vanessa Marr and Ottilie Hainsworth.