Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black.

Lately, we've been looking at the impact COVID-19 is having on various aspects of our lives. And on this episode,

among other things, we'll look at the rise in gender-based violence that the pandemic has

triggered around the world. And joining us on this episode is Yifat Suskind, who is the executive

director of Madre, which is a humanitarian organization dedicated to women's rights around the world.

She's also the presenter of a very popular TED Talk called, In Uncertain Times, Think Like a

Mother. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. You wrote an article last month,

noting that domestic violence increases when communities face crisis.

So explain why and what is happening with the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of domestic violence.

Well, unfortunately, what we have seen accompanying the spread of the violence, of the virus, rather,

almost everywhere, is a really sharp

uptick in domestic violence. So this was first noted in China, where we had the biggest number of

cases in the beginning of the pandemic. But as the virus spread to Europe and then to the US,

and now to much of Latin America and beginning in Africa and the Middle East as well.

We're noting that wherever there are increased cases of COVID-19, we're seeing along with

that, this rise in domestic violence.

And I want to emphasize sort of the universality of know, domestic violence is one of those issues that is

unfortunately not, you know, specific to any small group of people or any one country or culture.

It really is kind of a universal byproduct of sort of how we do gender and what we see in communities

every place, not just in this crisis, but we saw the same thing in the U.S. South after Hurricane Katrina.

We see it when bombing rates happen in countries in the Middle East, regardless almost of the type of disaster it is.

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