 but we have a short video lecture today about family violence and abuse and the implications of the current COVID pandemic for these issues. So I'll go ahead and share some slides. As I've been revising my textbook, The Family, I was updating the material on family violence and abuse intimate partner violence, sexual assault and rape. And that should be out in half a year or so. In the meantime, I wanted to give some thought to the questions that have been raised about the possible implications of the current crisis for these issues. And I thought it would be a good subject to put together into a video lecture for you. You may have seen headlines like this. The home isn't always a safe place for victims of domestic violence or rise in domestic violence around the world associated with the lockdowns. We don't really have all the information yet to draw conclusions like that, but we do know enough from our general knowledge and what we know about the trends so far to raise some questions and start thinking through the issues. So that's what I'll be doing here. To put this in its historical context a little, we really have a remarkable large decline in violence in this country since the 1990s. And family violence in particular, this chart shows the violent victimization of people age 12 to 17 by family members. This is from the National Crime Victimization Survey. So it's from a survey, I'm asking people what violence they had experienced. And you can see this just very, very dramatic decline from about 14 incidents per hundred, for a per thousand population all the way down to just over two, so very big decline in family violence. So the backdrop to this is this very good news and that sets the stage for where we are today. We can say some things about why this violence has declined, there's a very broad literature on why a violent crime has declined in general in the United States and in some other countries, which I'm not gonna get into entirely, but there's some specific issues related to family violence that may be relevant. This is all slightly speculative as it's hard to specifically attribute change in the level of violence to particular changes in social practices. There has been a rise in services for people experiencing or at risk of experiencing family violence, the shelters and hotlines that you may be aware of. These help people to gain some protection or distance from abusive partners in particular. So that's been one factor. Another is the overall trend towards women's independence. The rising education and employment prospects, they are the rising cultural acceptance of women's independence, single parenthood and so on has made it easier, both sort of logistically and structurally and also in terms of cultural values for women to leave abusive relationships. And then frankly, the decline in marriage and cohabiting relationships just the less time that people, especially women, spend in relationships actually reduces their exposure to the main risk factor which is beating the presence of spacer partner. Nevertheless, intimate partner violence remains a serious problem. I'll talk about child abuse, neglect in a minute. When we look at sort of a lifetime measure, have you ever experienced this? You can see a little over a quarter of men and women have sort of ever experienced violence in their relationships. As you go down the chart, you get to more serious violence, severe physical violence, contact sexual violence that is sexual violence, that's not just a threat. And then stalking and on those, you see a much bigger gender disparity. So women are much more likely to experience stalking and contact sexual violence, for example, than the overall slap, push, shove measure. So there's a very strong gender component to this. That's not surprising. To define the sphere that we're talking about when we say family violence and abuse, we're putting it in a particular context, an institutional context, as I described in the book. The social context of the family defines the arena we're talking about. These are caring or intimate relationships, relationships with partners, romantic or sexual partners with children, with elders, people for whom there is a caring or intimate relationship within the family. Key issue related to family violence and abuse is the secrecy and isolation that is, if not prevalent, at least made possible by the way families are structured, literally within the walls of a home, but also more figuratively within the sphere of privacy that we construct around families, that people value very highly when it's good and when it's bad, makes family violence and abuse a very difficult and up-to-crack. I always take the perspective that I wanna reinforce the perspective that when we talk about family violence and abuse, we're not talking about bad apples and individuals with bad behavior only, we're talking about a systemic feature of family life. That does not mean that everybody experiences violence and abuse, what it means is it happens at a high enough level of prevalence and has continued to happen as society, these changes that we can start to think of it as a structural feature of family life. Doesn't mean it can't be changed, of course, as you saw the big decline, but we wanna think of what our institution and the structures of our society are doing to sort of enable or reproduce this violence over time. Okay, specifically on child abuse and neglect, we have a definition where it's the act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker that results in or puts children at risk for physical, emotional, harm, sexual abuse, or exploitation. So it's an act or failure to act, that's what makes it abuse or neglect, and then it's physical, emotional, sexual abuse or exploitation. This chart just shows who the perpetrator is in reported cases of sexual abuse of child abuse and neglect, and it's overwhelmingly parents, family members, mother, father, mother and father, male relative, and then down the much less frequent categories below. So the family is a very dangerous place for children. Obviously neglect sort of has to be done by families because that's who is responsible for children, so only if you're responsible for it can you be guilty of not meeting your responsibility. The high number for mothers here is a feature, a function of the fact that many children live with their mothers, only not their fathers. So this is a family problem. We have some particular risk factors that we wanna consider when we're thinking about how the current crisis might be affecting this problem. In general, parents with mental health problems of their own, such including behavior problems like impulse control or self-esteem, or any history of violence, including the victims of violence, that those are risk factors for violence in the family today. Households where there's violence between adults are often also dangerous places for violence that can also come to involve the children. Poverty, poor families and poor neighborhoods are associated with increased risk of abuse and neglect. It's partly just because neglect, poverty itself may bring neglect in the sense of not having the resources, but also whatever has brought people to be in poverty also makes their lives difficult in ways that may increase the risk of violence and abuse. And that's also related to the problem of weak family and support networks. So having people around and available and in touch with the resources themselves to respond to a crisis or a problem within families is very important, especially after something happens so that people know and can take steps to intervene. There's been a lot of these stories. I'll show you one. This is from a local TV station talking about, talking with advocates who are concerned about domestic violence and child abuse and how the current lockdown may be increasing those risks. So we'll watch the clip. We need you to stay home. Ohio is staying home to stay well, but for some home is the one place that can do the most harm. We're very concerned. We know that this is a dangerous time for people to be home. The coronavirus has not slowed partner and child abuse. The problem weighing on the mind of Governor Mike DeWine who addressed the concern Thursday. When the children stay home, they're not seen by someone outside the family. When you have children who are not being seen, you know, we certainly worry about that. The CEO of the Domestic Violence and Child Advocacy Center in Cleveland says the calls for help are steady. What we are seeing on those calls is that there's a greater degree of fear and anxiety. People are really scared right now and there is escalating abuse. Because of the coronavirus, many children are isolated at home with their abuser away from other relatives, teachers, friends and help. We're seeing more violent types of situations and that leaves us real concerned about the safety of the kids. Officials at Cuyahoga County Children and Family Services say they are still working during this virus crisis to protect the most vulnerable. About 60% of our calls in March were about physical abuse and that's up about 3 to 4% overall. The coronavirus has only added stress while dwindling income and in some cases, food. School staff might be reporting anything that they notice or they see that's going on with the child and that's not happening. As advocates and therapists, see a surge in requests for support. One of the biggest ways the public can help is to watch over one another and report abuse. We all need to be checking in on each other right now and taking care of each other. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about how the COVID pandemic may be affecting issues of abuse and neglect. You may hear a lot of the sort of first world problems type discussion of, oh, we're stuck in our family, oh, we're watching the same TV shows, oh, we're eating boring food, et cetera, et cetera. You know, our pets are, you know, the daily life struggles of people whose lives are okay during this crisis. And of course, that's not gonna tell you the whole story, especially when things are going really wrong. Some key factors, economic stress and hardship is definitely a factor for abuse and neglect and family violence in general. Just in the last few weeks, speaking as they are on April 6th, about 10 million people have filed new unemployment claims. That's an absolutely astounding number. There's a huge number of families that have had a very serious economic shock, lost their incomes. The sheltering, of course, is isolating people from their support networks. Family and friends are also sheltering. Who is going to check in on families where there may be trouble? Who's going to notice if something is going wrong? Who is going to help if somebody needs help? Someone to talk to, someone to literally escape to and so on. So all of those resources, as people's movements are constrained to within their households, their access to support and help, obviously can be diminished by that. So that's a serious issue. Various kinds of services may be unavailable. Whether they're social services, formerly in the government or informal or nonprofit, non-governmental organizations may just not have the resources to work during this period. They may not have the staff. And so they might not be providing the services that people are used to that are sort of an outlet or a safety valve for families that are experiencing violence. And then there's a whole network of people, especially with child abuse, where there are people who are required by law to report and by ethics to report violence or abuse if they're made aware of it. This includes teachers, clergy in some states, health care providers. So all of those interactions become a place when the outside world can kind of step into the family and intervene if there's violence or abuse going on. And with all of that interaction cut down, we're just not gonna know about as much of the violence and abuse that may be happening within families. So these are all theoretical. That is, we don't have evidence that these things are all happening yet, but we have reason to be very concerned that they very well might be. I'll switch to intimate partner violence, away from children to adults. As in the case of family violence with children, we've seen a big decrease in intimate partner violence among adults. You, from something like 16 per thousand women experiencing intimate partner violence in the mid 90s down to about four. So about a three quarters reduction in intimate partner violence as reported on this survey, which is a good quality survey as well as we can do. For men, actually the intimate partner violence has also declined, but obviously much, much lower. So it's not as much of a central concern for us. We can see some possible COVID implications when we look at homicides. The previous chart was non-fatal violence because it's based on a survey. You can only fill it out if you're alive. When we look at homicides, we see that women are most likely to be killed by their intimate partners. So in 2018, a little over a thousand women were killed by intimate partners. Only 360 men were, although a lot more men are murdered overall for women is much more concentrated among intimate partners. And for men it's much more likely to be associates or strangers, that is friends, criminal partners and rivals and so on, and also strangers. So interestingly, in the COVID crisis, we may actually see intimate partner, we may see homicide falling more for men because they're just simply having less interaction with each other and with the people who are doing the potential violence and homicide or just aren't interacting with as many victims. So that we could see a decline in homicide, but maybe not as much for women who are spending a lot of time with their spouses and partners. There are patterns to intimate partner violence and two broad categories that we identify in the research. One is called situational couple violence, sometimes have been called common couple violence. And this is violence that arises out of a specific dispute or conflict. There's not exactly a pattern of escalation over time and it may be triggered by things like stress by losing a job, by economic shocks and so on. So that's why we would be very concerned right now that we might be seeing more of this in families today, simply more things to be in conflict about. On the other hand is the more serious violence in the sense of a pattern of escalation and often very harmful or even fatal consequences used to be called intimate terrorism, now often called coercive controlling violence. And this is a campaign for control and domination usually by men over women, although not exclusively, often an escalating pattern of violence. Now, the reason we're concerned about COVID with regard to this are the isolation and maybe making it maybe conducive to this pattern of escalating control. That is the victims, usually the women of this kind of violence usually need some kind of outside support or intervention to escape or mitigate this violence. And if they're isolated, they may not have that. In addition, the threats related to going out as dangerous, who makes decisions in terms of who can go out and when the negotiation of rules for mobility and so on, all that can kind of feed into the controlling violent impulses and behavior of the mostly men who are practicing this kind of violence. So this is where we'd be very concerned about an increase in the violence associated with COVID. Now, only a little bit less than half of all intimate partner violence going back to that same national crime victimization survey is ever reported to police. So most of it is not reported. And the reasons that women give for this, I analyzed here, fear of reprisal or getting the offender in trouble is the most common reason. That is either the person doing the violence is going to punish me for reporting it or the person doing the violence is going to be taken away from our family or we'll lose the economic support and so on. So the idea of bringing the police and it's going to cause more harm than good. Delt with it personally is about 20%. And then this lack of faith in the police that won't come or I don't think they would help or they'd be biased against me. It's the third reason that people give for why they don't report it. All of this, we don't know how this would play out in the context of this pandemic environment but it seems possible that it could lead to less reporting or not. That's just speculation. So we don't really know. A few words about rape and sexual assault. Most sexual assault is perpetrated by people that the victim knows, victims mostly women. Acquaintances that includes people that people are on dates with, intimate partners. That's together about two thirds of the rape and sexual assault. Stranger rape or sexual assault is not unheard of at all. It's about 24% of cases. And so it raises the question of what would be happening now. So most are perpetrated by acquaintances and intimate partners. So on the downside now, women are more isolated with their spouses and cohabiting partners, increased risk. On the other hand, less exposure to acquaintances and strangers. There's less moving around, less dating and just sort of less exposure to potential perpetrators. So we don't know how this will go overall but we have reasons to be concerned about the intimate partner aspect of this as I discussed earlier. I wanna touch on a couple of interventions that we have reason to believe may be helpful or at least are lots of people think they're good so they're trying them, which may be factors in the, as we try to deal with the current situation. One innovation has been this practice of rapid assessment by police when they arrive at the scene, they have sort of a checklist and it formalizes or routinizes the assessment of how serious is this violence? Does it fit a pattern of escalation? And right at the scene when the police are called should they separate these partners and track the victim towards, victim support services or some kind of some kind that may help with something like an escape plan. So there's some promise to that. When there's a recurring pattern, people have used civil protection orders, sort of a court ordering people to stay away from the victim of their violence or abuse, some success with that approach. Courts have in some cases mandated psychological treatment or intervention of various kinds. The record on this is rather mixed but some positive results. Breaking a family violence into its own category in the judicial system so that the judges working in that are sort of experts and focus sort of specialized, bring their expertise to that issue. Again, mixed results. And then I mentioned earlier, that's a possible cause and decline the sort of broad expanse of domestic violence victim services or various kinds, including things like making an escape plan, identifying when sort of how bad the problem is, support and counseling and so on. Now, if we had to speak to client in violence since the 1990s, over a quarter century or so, what does this imply about the future and what is what we're going through now apply about the future, imply about the future, obviously too early to say, but we're trying to get on top of our situation here. So there's an argument, a general argument that modernity, this period sort of post industrial, since industrialization to the present has brought an era of less interpersonal violence. A few factors play into that. One is the whole construction of childhood as a long period of innocence where children sort of deserve to have a life of that pain and suffering as a stage of life, which is recognized by parents and families and institutions and the government and so on. And so just sort of protecting children with this image of childhood as a period of innocence. So that's sort of a modern innovation. In addition, the general rise of state power, although states can of course do terrible things, the giving the state the power to control violence and resolve disputes may reduce interpersonal violence because instead of killing or beating up the person you're having a conflict with, there's a process for outsourcing that intervention to a formal authority. It raises a whole different set of questions of surveillance and oppression from states, but may reduce interpersonal violence. And then this argument has been made by Stephen Pinker and others that the rise of rationality and reason as an ideal itself reduces interpersonal violence because you sort of need a reason to do things and you sort of reason yourself out of the violent resolution to things. So that's an ideal that maybe this whole era, this long-term era in terms of a couple of hundred years has been a decline in interpersonal violence and maybe that continues. For families, and this is especially relevant to the last quarter century in those figures that I showed, we know that having a history of violence in childhood is a serious predictor of violence in adulthood. So experiencing less violence in childhood, parents experiencing less violence may really translate, may have its own momentum and produce subsequent generations with less violence. So that could be great. Now, when we have things like, I would have, two months ago, I would have said climate change or Trump, but now we have this issue of the pandemic and it raises the question, does history really have a direction? Can you say, oh, we're moving in the direction from this past period with more violence, this future with less violence, how does that work? It raises, it unsettles any narrative that has to do with a direction of history is unsettled by big crises if they don't fit in that narrative. So we don't have an answer for this. We don't have an answer for a lot of what I've talked about today, but I hope that by giving the context and terms and some background statistics, you'll be able to figure out what's going on now and maybe we can take good steps as a society to improve some of these problems. Thanks for the say.