Introduction In the early weeks and months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the scale of its potential impact was not yet apparent. In March 2020, the British government implemented UK-wide lockdown measures requiring people to stay at home except for very limited purposes, and banning meeting with more than one person in public ( Cabinet Office, 2020a ). Confining people to their homes had implications for caring in intimate and social relationships. In the spring/summer of 2020, I undertook a small-scale qualitative study to examine the impact of COVID-19 and
damaging for women. Namely, how nationwide ‘lockdowns’ have exacerbated existing gender disparities in caring, with women more likely to pick up home learning and caring to fill the gap of physically closed educational and childcare establishments, and with informal grandparental care strongly discouraged. Thus, the very social distancing measures that women endorse have impacted women negatively more than men, and have led to increased gender inequality, both intra-household and in the labour market, with women being more likely to have been made unemployed or
If prison regimes had continued as normal during the COVID-19 lockdown, social distancing would have been impossible. Therefore, sweeping restrictions were imposed confining prisoners to their cells, cancelling communal activity and prohibiting visits from family and friends.
This insightful book identifies the risks posed by prison lockdowns to minority ethnic prisoners, foreign national prisoners and prisoners from Traveller and Roma communities across the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. It documents the unequal impacts on their mental and physical health, feelings of isolation and fear, access to services and contact with visitors.
The legacy of the lockdown will be profound. This book exposes the long-term significance and impact on minority ethnic prisoners.
Key messages Argues for a justification of lockdown policies by hypothetical consent. Shows why such consent is contingent upon fear from risks. Critically reflects the justificatory role of fear. Introduction The emergence of the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in 2020 brought about a major global crisis. Today, around 100 million people have been infected worldwide, and over 2 million people had died of COVID-19 by January 2021 (Worldometers, 2021). Almost all states across the world implemented radical measures to limit the spread of the disease
23 1 Britain enters lockdown There was nothing that could have prepared us for lockdown. It felt like eternity. Lucky were those who had Wi-Fi. But stuck in a [women’s] refuge where Wi-Fi was hard to come by, let alone visitors, our mental health was really getting the best of us. You look out the window and just think, ‘You lucky dog owners, you can just walk out the house, not looking who’s behind you, or take your child for a bike ride.’ Freedom looks very different when you are inside a refuge. Some might call it minimised living. Others, like my
the unthinkable. Morning and evening we make our way, our small, interdependent, interspecies cluster: two canines, two humans, bound to one another by our shared intimacies and newly discovered vulnerabilities. Shrouded in our invisible pod, already, by reflex, we turn into a collective huddle as others approach, with only a small acknowledgement – a yelp, a namaste – across the width of the street. Almost overnight, the mundane practice of our walks has acquired new inflections: in an economy of lockdown, it seems, a dog to be walked represents a new type of
Key messages During the first lockdown in England there was a significant change in victim and suspect demographics, with IPV increasing among older victims and suspects and decreasing for younger victims and suspects, possibly reflecting an increase in IPV between cohabiting couples. Crime types differed, with increases in non-physical IPV which could be committed remotely, indicating that non-cohabiting suspects found alternative methods of abusing their victims during lockdown. Police responses to IPV altered during lockdown, with reductions in
where the majority of people aren’t willing to talk about it which creates an atmosphere of stigma and the associated discrimination that could have also resulted from GBV being viewed as a sensitive and taboo topic by these participants. Introduction Background The outbreak of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 ( WHO, 2020c ) was declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020 ( WHO, 2020b ). The highly virulent nature of COVID-19 led most countries to institute lockdowns ( UN, 2020b ) that were meant to curb the pandemic by
Introduction This chapter summarises two pieces of research conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–21 ( Community Matters, 2021a ; Community Matters, 2021b ). The aim was to discover the different ways in which community buildings responded to the immediate situation of lockdown in March 2020 and the impact of their closure on both their short- and longer-term future. The question quoted in the title was a semi-flippant remark made by an interviewee which summarised the situation in which community buildings found themselves as infection rates
