Work or school may be their only refuge from abusers

The argument

Experts who study domestic violence say the increases are underreported because some victims cannot get away from their abusers to call police. That observation is the core of the argument: reporting abuse requires a moment out of the abuser's presence, and for many victims the only reliable such moments were the hours spent at work or at school. Those places were not merely a break from the home; they were the practical precondition for seeking help, and the point at which someone else might notice what was happening. Now that people are being asked to stay in their homes, that precondition disappears, and those experiencing domestic violence could be even more cut off, living continuously alongside the person harming them with no scheduled absence to make a call from and no third party positioned to see anything. Enforced confinement therefore does two things at once: it increases exposure to the abuser and removes the route by which the abuse could be reported. The recorded figures still moved, despite that suppression. Of the 22 law enforcement agencies across the United States that responded to NBC News' request for data on domestic violence calls, 18 departments said they had seen a rise in March. Houston police received about 300 more domestic violence calls in March than they did in February, a roughly 20 percent increase. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, police fielded 517 additional calls about domestic violence in March compared to the same month last year, an 18 percent jump, while Phoenix police received nearly 200 more calls, an increase of nearly 6 percent. Children lost the same protection in a different form. At school they are able to be under the watchful eye of a teacher or other adult authority figures. But now that school has been canceled for the remainder of the school year, many children won't have the opportunities for their abuse to be recognized.

Premises

Counter-arguments

A counter notes that loss of a refuge is one mechanism among several, and the rival position stresses that the pandemic's financial stress, job loss and confinement with an abuser amplify violence independently of the 'refuge' point — so removing work and school explains reduced chances to escape and be noticed, but not necessarily the underlying rise in abuse. Critics also caution that the March call figures conflate increased incidence with increased reporting, and that the very cutting-off the argument describes would, if anything, suppress reporting, complicating any clean causal reading of the data.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Loss of a workplace or school refuge explains reduced chances to escape or be noticed, but not necessarily the underlying increase in abuse, which the rival account attributes to financial and confinement stress. [Rejecting P3] Rising police-call figures may reflect changes in reporting as well as incidence, and the cutting-off the argument describes would tend to suppress reporting, so the data do not cleanly isolate the 'refuge' mechanism.