0598742 - SOÚ 2025 eng A - Abstract
Černohorská, Vanda - Nyklová, Blanka
Ignorance as policy? Gender-based violence under Covid-19 pandemic in Czechia.
[Sociology of Health and Medicine in the Public Arena during the Covid-19 Pandemic and beyond. Praha, 24.06.2023-26.06.2023]
Method of presentation: Přednáška
Event organizer: Research Network of Sociology of Health and Medicine, European Sociological Association (ESA RN16)
EU Projects: European Commission(XE) 101015990 - RESISTIRE
Institutional support: RVO:68378025
Keywords : gender based violence * covid-19 pandemic * theory of ignorance
OECD category: Sociology

In the paper, we draw on the fact that the issue of gender-based domestic violence is in Czechia not framed as a threat to public health as is often the case elsewhere. We argue that this position is made possible by actual, alleged and strategically used claims to ignorance (Tuana 2006) that affect the whole system of prevention and assistance to survivors of this type of violence. To substantiate our claim, we offer an analysis based on two data sets focused on the effects of Covid-19 pandemic measures on the issue of domestic (esp. intimate partner) violence. The first one is an extensive explorative qualitative study conducted from April to December 2020 that used semi-structured interviews, interviews with clients of an assistance-providing organisation, and analyses of concrete cases from the period of the first pandemic lockdown in the Czech Republic. The second data set comprises policies aimed at gender-based violence as these were developed across the EU including Czechia. The government of the Czech Republic did not introduce any special measures to address domestic violence during any of the lockdowns or as part of any counter-pandemic measures. The issue of gender-based violence thus remained separate from public health policy focus even under the Covid-19 pandemic. This among other things means we do not have medical data on the issue from both before and during the pandemic, which then contributes to continuing with the framing of this type of violence as outside the scopes of health policy: we simply do not know (sic!) what the scale of the issue is.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0356345