COVID-19 and Violence Against Women: The evidence behind the talk

Social distancing measures have posed challenges to collecting official statistics on the prevalence of VAWG, as many face-to-face surveys have been interrupted due to fear of infection. Remote (non-face-to-face) surveys on this topic carry some methodological, ethical and safety challenges, and thus have not enabled the collection of data on prevalence since COVID-19 started. Considering these limitations, and with the goal of gathering proxy information on related trends, UN Women partnered with Quilt.AI and UNFPA to conduct an analysis of big data in eight countries: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore. The analysis identified trends from discourse data generated across social media platforms and search engines. In particular, big data on people’s search behaviour on VAWG-related topics (both before the onset of the pandemic and since) were considered.