EARLIER this week, Dr David Nabaro from the World Health Organisation appealed to world leaders to avoid using lockdowns as the primary control method in their battles against Covid-19.

According to him, lockdowns have “one consequence that you must never ever belittle and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer”.

However, that’s not entirely true isn’t it? Not the whole truth at least.

While the impacts of lockdowns are extremely punishing towards individuals from the lower-income group, a lockdown does more than just that.

The unintended consequences of a lockdown are almost as indiscriminate as the virus itself, paralysing women, across all age groups and social classes, physically and mentally.

Women who serve either as essential or informal workers, such as doctors, nurses and street vendors, are both at heightened risk of violence as they navigate deserted public spaces and transportation services under lockdown.

Women who are trapped at home, on the other hand, now are either at an increased risk of domestic violence or subjected to increased level of unpaid domestic workload.

The inevitable economic impacts that trail behind lockdowns are also likely to expose girls and adolescent girls to sexual exploitation and child marriage.

With more people spending time online with movement restrictions in place, women and girls in chatrooms, gaming platforms and even business video calls are more likely to be exposed to some form of harassment or violence. These are also consequences that we must never ever belittle.

Women at home

Since the beginning of the lockdown in Malaysia, Talian Kasih (the national crisis public hotline for social issues) reported a 57% increase in calls relating to domestic violence.

This trend can also be observed across the world where there is 33% increase in helpline calls for domestic violence in Singapore and 25% in Argentina, as reported by a UNDP brief on gender-based violence and Covid-19.

As lockdowns expand to contain the spread of the virus, women with violent partners are further trapped in their nightmare.

The isolation from their family, friends and other resources would make it harder from them to escape this ordeal. The tendency to abuse would also increase in frequency and severity when abusers are exposed to multiple stressors like financial uncertainty, movement restrictions and sudden change in lifestyle.

With indirect harms like disrupted justice services and closure of shelters that are not recognised as essential services added into the equation, lockdown orders are no different than execution orders for these women.

Working women

Across the globe, women are more likely to be employed in the informal sector, narrowing their access to social protections on top of already earning less and consequently, saving less.

If there’s a formula to make an individual especially vulnerable to economic shocks, this is perhaps what it would look like. This dreadful combination also led to mothers being more likely to either quit their job or lose it during the lockdown in comparison to fathers.

As for the working mums and single mothers who managed to dodge the unemployment bullet, they are instead expected to shoulder the increased domestic workload from closure of schools and care centres.

Unfair division of labour at home is not a new problem for women but a lockdown would surely escalate the harms of it.

In their attempt to juggle between the twisted demands placed unto mothers and the obligations owed as a paid employee, it is not just the job that they’ll get to keep but also the outsized negative effects on their mental health and physical well-being.

Girls and adolescents

Poverty has always been the main culprit behind child marriage arrangements. With economic disruption increasing multi-fold due to lockdowns, families are more likely to marry off their daughters under the assumption that their perceived burden of caring for them would be alleviated.

According to United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) child marriage is also projected to increase, in large part due to delays in the implementation of programmes to end the harmful practice.

In Malaysia for example, earlier in January a National Strategy Plan on handling causes of child marriage was launched by the then deputy prime minister Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail.

However, conversations on the topic have been virtually non-existent since. It is without a doubt that this deafening silence would continue to be prolonged if lockdown orders are made without considerations and proper safeguarding mechanisms for vulnerable girls.

The closure of schools and child care would also limit their access to educational personnel who often play a key role in detecting and reporting cases of child sexual exploitation.

To make matters worse, Interpol reported that live-streaming of child sexual exploitation for payment has seen an increase in recent years, with demand likely to further increase due to movement restrictions.

This would naturally lead to the supply of live-streamed child sexual exploitation and abuse material being more likely to rise as victims may be locked down with individuals facing increased economic hardship.

Without any reservation, governments around the world must stop using lockdowns as the primary tool against Covid-19 and rethink their strategy.

At the very least, some form of mechanisms must be put in place to manage these unintended consequences.

The world that we will rebuild after this pandemic has to be one that is welcoming for individuals of all age, class and gender but that could only start by recognising the potential harms of our actions today.

This virus could take away our lives, our jobs and our comfort, but we should never allow it to take our humanity. – October 15, 2020.

* Cellini Basri is an analyst at Bait al Amanah. 

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.