COVID-19, staying at home, and domestic violence

Abstract

We analyze how staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic affects the rates of domestic violence in the U.S. Using police dispatch and crime data from 36 police and sheriff's departments and mobile device tracking data, we find that reported incidents of domestic violence increase as more people stay at home. Specifically, we estimate that staying at home due to COVID-19 increased domestic violence by over 5% on average from March 13 to May 24, 2020. This is consistent with a theory of exposure reduction, where victims and abusers stuck at home are more likely to fight.

Keywords: COVID-19; Domestic violence; Exposure reduction; Pandemics; Social distancing.

Fig. 1

Standardized measures of DV, staying at home, and COVID-19. The vertical dotted line represents March 20, when the first stay-at-home orders come into effect in our sample. Weekly averages of domestic violence and the fraction of people at home all day are standardized through a basic scaling procedure that sets the mean to zero and the standard deviation to 1. The date range is from 1/1/2020 to 5/31/2020

Fig. 2

Removing one city, stay at home