Increasing Resilience of Survivor-Centered Social Systems: Adapting to COVID Related Constraints in Access to Services and Built Environment Use Patterns

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Domestic violence is a widespread and complex problem affecting 12 million victims each year in the US. Following disasters and emergencies, the risk of domestic violence increases due a complex set of factors including economic stress, changes in community dynamics, and lack of access to regular community-based supports. Greater exposure to a disaster’s impacts and severity is associated with higher rates of domestic violence. This has been consistent across hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, oil spills, pandemics like the 2009 H1N1 Novel Influenza A, and outbreaks like Ebola. Not surprisingly, rates of domestic violence have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, COVID-19’s impacts are unique because stay-at-home orders and other measures implemented to control the spread of disease also isolated victims with their abusers. Help-seeking options are diminished as social distancing reduced capacity of domestic violence shelters and fear of contracting COVID-19 discouraged victims from seeking medical care and other services. Disruptions to socio-technical systems and constraints on built environment use patterns have made it difficult to provide sound and effective services, limited transportation options, and constrained access to housing, shelters, childcare facilities, and other services. This research project explores how agencies and organizations addressing domestic violence have attempted to adapt to the pandemic and the necessary constraints to services, infrastructure systems, and built environment use patterns. The findings will provide key data for advancing the health and welfare of millions potentially vulnerable to domestic violence during pandemics and in the aftermath of disasters. In non-disaster settings, agencies that provide support for domestic violence victims draw on empowerment theories to deliver survivor-centered services utilizing critical infrastructure systems and built environments to support victims. However, disruptions resulting from disasters generally, and from COVID-19 specifically, have challenged providers’ ability to maintain the provision of empowerment-centered services. This is significant because the prevalence of disruptions to survivor-centered domestic violence services and built environments during the COVID-19 pandemic may be associated with both reductions in survivor access to resources and to higher rates of domestic violence, compared to services and environments that were not disrupted. The objective of this study is to test empowerment models in the context of disasters generally, and to extend these models to capture adaptations to the built environment use patterns where services are provided to vulnerable populations after a disaster. Extending empowerment models to the domain of disasters will improve domestic violence systems’ function in disaster settings and will serve as a prototype to improve the effectiveness of other social systems that are part of the social context of the empowerment models. This research will provide critical evidence to support changes in both research and practice that extend the empowerment models to the domain of disasters and the realm of built environments. More generally, this study is an important contribution to our understanding of the strengths and limitations of theoretical models to the post-disaster provision of services within the context of changes to populations, sociology-technical systems, and built environment use patterns during and after disasters.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.