UNHCR, Nov 25, 2020
Mónica Pérez* met her first boyfriend when she was 16, not long after she stepped off a bus in the Colombian border city of Cúcuta. When she discovered she was pregnant, her boyfriend started to hit her and call her names.
After she went into labour, he dropped her off at the hospital, leaving the teen to give birth alone, far from her mother and sisters back home in Venezuela.
Six months later, she became involved with a new partner. Everything was going well, she said, until the arrival of COVID-19.
“I think it may have had something to do with lockdown, which made him very stressed and constantly worried about being broke,” she recalled. “He started to hurt me and say really awful things to me …. He wouldn’t let me use Facebook or talk to my mother or my sisters. He controlled what I wore and even burned a bunch of my clothes.”
By early April, over half the world’s population was living under lockdown and women like Mónica with violent partners found themselves trapped with their abusers and cut off from the support of friends and family. Within months of the outbreak starting, UN Women was warning of a Shadow Pandemic, as all types of violence against women and girls, but particularly domestic violence, intensified.
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