In the shadow of the pandemic, domestic violence and slavery are still flourishing

With such monstrous nonchalance, the man in the short video clip drags the Ethiopian domestic worker by her hair down the street in broad daylight. She is screaming her heart out as her shoes are ripped off by the concrete underneath her. He loosens his grip briefly to savagely beat her. People watch from their balconies, someone is clearly filming.

This disturbing video was shot just a few kilometres east of Beirut. Activists who located the woman this week said she is now safe but due to be sent home on Monday. They told me the attacker, her employer, was taken into custody but reportedly released only a day later. It is a painful reminder of the ongoing shadow pandemic within the pandemic: domestic violence and emotional abuse.

Rights groups across the world warned in 2020 that cases of abuse in the home soared during coronavirus lockdowns, which piled emotional and financial pressure on households. This (although not exclusively) overwhelmingly impacted women (one in three women worldwide experience physical or sexual violence mostly from intimate partners, according to the UN). Domestic migrant workers in countries like Lebanon, who are trapped in the slave-like kafala sponsorship system and often living with their employers, found themselves on the searing frontline of that.

But the truth is, this shadow pandemic didn’t just stop because lockdowns were lifted. Rights workers have told me that instances of violence – whether physical, emotional, financial, or sexual abuse – continue to rise for many reasons, not least because of Covid isolation periods and ongoing associated economic woes.

In Lebanon, this is depressingly true. The pandemic and an unprecedented explosion in Beirut in August 2020 came alongside and contributed to one of the most spectacular economic collapses in modern history.

This week, the Lebanese lira surpassed a new record low of 30,000 lira to the dollar, even though it is still pegged at 1,500. This has helped contribute to the highest inflation rates in the world, outstripping Venezuela and Zimbabwe. It means one single canister of cooking gas costs more than half the monthly minimum wage, and the cost of four weeks’ use of a generator, essential as there is no longer any state-proved electricity, is six times a regular monthly salary.

The poorest and most vulnerable have, of course, been hardest hit. Among them are the estimated 250,000 domestic migrant workers, who work in Lebanon under the kafala system. Used across countries in the Middle East, the kafala system shuts workers out of basic protections like a minimum wage, limits on working hours or the right to change jobs without their employer’s consent. They cannot even regain control of their passports to leave the country if they want out. Many women over the past two years have messaged me, trapped in their employer’s houses, where they are forced to work without money or proper food.

According to Human Rights Watch, since the start of the pandemic and the economic collapse, employers in Lebanon took to abandoning hundreds of workers outside consulates or embassies, often without money, passports, their belongings or flight tickets home. One employer even posted a Nigerian domestic worker “for sale” on a Facebook page used to trade secondhand items.

As this week’s grim video shows, migrant workers trapped in that system are increasingly vulnerable to physical abuse too.

We cannot let the rise in domestic violence, in all its forms, disappear from the agenda. Beyond Lebanon, it is an issue impacting homes in every country, in every town, and likely in every street.

This week, as right groups were warning of abuse of domestic workers in Lebanon, I also coincidentally stumbled upon Maid – a searingly triggering miniseries about an impoverished American domestic worker and mother called Alex, who struggles to break free from her abusive partner, not even realising she is a victim of domestic violence.

Since it came out in October, it has sparked a slew of responses from many women who saw their own lockdown experiences played out in the storyline. We need to keep these conversations going.

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There is no coronavirus pandemic in Maid but as I watched it in Covid isolation myself, I couldn’t help thinking that during the pandemic, the tiny lifelines that end up saving Alex would have completely vanished, simply because she would have been increasingly isolated.

Domestic violence hotlines have reported that Covid isolation periods and the associated impacts of the pandemic continue to allow abusers to go to new extremes to exert control beyond the obvious, including lying about pandemic risk, making up lockdown rules, and controlling access to money and methods of communication with the outside world.

I have mainly spoken about women in this piece, but it is, of course, not exclusively something women face. It is often more taboo to speak about when men are the victims and survivors of this kind of abuse. Now more than ever, we need to keep speaking out about all forms of violence in the home and the impact the pandemic continues to have – from emotionally abused mothers in the US to modern slavery in Lebanon.