Staying Home, Staying Safe? A Short-Term Analysis of COVID-19 on Dallas Domestic Violence

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the lives of persons around the world and social scientists are just beginning to understand its consequences on human behavior. One policy that public health officials put in place to help stop the spread of the virus were stay-at-home/shelter-in-place lockdown-style orders. While designed to protect people from the coronavirus, one potential and unintended consequence of such orders could be an increase in domestic violence – including abuse of partners, elders or children. Stay-at-home orders result in perpetrators and victims being confined in close quarters for long periods of time. In this study, we use data from Dallas, Texas to examine the extent to which a local order was associated with an increase in domestic violence. Our results provide some evidence for a short-term spike in the 2 weeks after the lockdown was instituted but a decrease thereafter. We note that it is difficult to determine just how much the lockdown was the cause of this increase as the domestic violence trend was increasing prior to the order

Disability and victimization in a national sample of children and youth.

Abstract Although past research has found higher rates of violence, crime, and abuse among children with disabilities, most studies combine diverse forms of disability into one measure and assess exposure to only one particular type of victimization. Based on a representative national sample of 4,046 children aged 2-17 from the 2008 National Survey of Children\u27s Exposure to Violence, the present study examines the associations between several different types of disability and past-year exposure to multiple forms of child victimization. Results suggest that attention-deficit disorder/attention-deficit with hyperactivity disorder elevates the risk for peer victimization and property crime, internalizing psychological disorders increase risk for both child maltreatment and sexual victimization, and developmental/learning disorders heighten risk only for property crime. In contrast, physical disability did not increase the risk for any type of victimization once confounding factors and co-occurring disabilities were controlled. It appears that disabilities associated with interpersonal and behavioral difficulties are most strongly associated with victimization risks