The escalation of domestic violence during the Covid-19 lockdown

Summary

Our research was designed to investigate the specific question of how unexpected unemployment influences domestic violence. We analysed the impacts of male job loss on perpetration of violence and the impacts of female job loss on victimisation using pre- Covid data. We then investigated whether unemployment benefits mitigate any impacts of unemployment on domestic violence. To do this, we gained access to court registers for Brazil that contain every domestic violence case during 2009-2017, a total of 2 million cases. We linked individuals involved in domestic violence cases to administrative data containing longitudinal employment records for every individual in Brazil through 2009-2017. Using the linked data, we set out to test whether unemployment shocks lead to domestic violence cases.