COVID-19, staying at home, and domestic violence
- PDF / 757,316 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 87 Downloads / 173 Views
COVID-19, staying at home, and domestic violence Lin-Chi Hsu
1
●
Alexander Henke1
Received: 17 July 2020 / Accepted: 3 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
1234567890();,:
Abstract We analyze how staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic affects the rates of domestic violence in the U.S. Using police dispatch and crime data from 36 police and sheriff’s departments and mobile device tracking data, we find that reported incidents of domestic violence increase as more people stay at home. Specifically, we estimate that staying at home due to COVID-19 increased domestic violence by over 5% on average from March 13 to May 24, 2020. This is consistent with a theory of exposure reduction, where victims and abusers stuck at home are more likely to fight. Keywords Domestic violence COVID-19 Social distancing Exposure reduction Pandemics ●
●
●
●
JEL codes J12 D19 I18 ●
●
1 Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic changes both individual behavior and government policy with respect to social distancing, broadly defined as being physically distant from other people. One example of social distancing is staying at home except for essential activities. While there are obvious health benefits to staying at home, it may force victims of domestic violence to spend more time with their abusers, heightening tensions and creating more opportunities for violence. We use the natural experiment of the pandemic to analyze the effect of staying at home on domestic violence incidents in the U.S. Using daily mobile device tracking data and dispatch and crime data from 36 police departments in 22 states, we first examine the strong co-movement between police reports of domestic violence and staying at home from March to May. We then estimate that the increase in staying at home due to COVID-19 increased domestic violence by over 5% from March 13 to
* Lin-Chi Hsu [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, Howard University, 2400 6th St NW, Washington, DC 20059, USA
L.-C. Hsu, A. Henke
May 24, 2020. If victims are less inclined to report while staying at home, this is an under-estimate of the true effect of staying at home on domestic violence. Our work builds upon a new strand of research on COVID-19, social distancing, and police incidents. Leslie and Wilson (2020) use open police report data from 15 police and sheriff’s departments in the U.S. They employ a difference-in-difference method, identifying the estimated start of social distancing as the start of the treatment. They find that the “social distancing” event increased domestic violence calls for service by 10% from March 9 to March 31. Henke and Hsu (2020a) find similar results using shelter-in-place orders, social distancing data, and open police data, finding that sheltering in place increased domestic violence by 6% in March and April. Silverio-Murillo and de la Miyar (2020) use data on a women’s call center service in Mexico and find increased requests for psychological services and decreased requests for legal aid after lockd
Data Loading...
