A 60% increase in emergency calls from women subjected to violence by their intimate partner has been reported in the World Health Organization Europe member states. Comparing April 2020 with the same period last year, WHO said that online inquiries to violence prevention support hotlines had also increased as much as fivefold. This comes as many countries are in lockdown or are restricting people’s ability to leave their homes because of the covid-19 pandemic. The United Nations Population Fund has warned that continuing lockdowns for six months could result in an extra 31 million cases of gender based violence globally. It added that the pandemic was expected to “cause significant delays in programmes to end female genital mutilation [FGM] and child marriage,” resulting in an estimated two million more cases of FGM and 13 million more child marriages over the next decade. WHO said that governments had a “moral obligation” to ensure that services designed to tackle violence were “available and resourced” and that hotline and online services were expanded to meet increased need ...
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", language="en", issn="0959-535X", doi="10.1136/bmj.m1872", url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1872" }