As the Women’s Policy Action Tank has documented over the course of 2020, women have had unique impacts and challenges as a result of COVID-19, and they also have unique recovery requirements following this unprecedented year. In today’s analysis, Shorna Moore of the Federation of Community Legal Services (@CommunityLawVic) provides insight into women’s experiences through their interactions with community legal services, and shares a recovery roadmap. This analysis is drawn from the newly-released report, A Just and Equitable COVID Recovery – A Community Legal Sector Plan for Victoria.

Women have a lot to be worried about; the impacts of COVID-19 may have long-term implications for women’s economic security and safety. Photo by Cade Renfroe on Unsplash

COVID-19 has shown us that disasters can affect women and men differently.. This pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities for girls and women, particularly given their enormous role as caregivers at home and as frontline healthcare, childcare and social workers. It is clear that if we want to deliver health, wellbeing and equality for all, we need a solid gender lens on recovery. This includes positioning girls, women, and young people — in all their diversity– front and centre.

The Community Legal Centre sector has seen first-hand how COVID-19 has affected the Victorian community, especially those who are most likely to experience discrimination and injustice, including women and children. The pandemic has highlighted and worsened existing weaknesses in legal protections and the processes in place to uphold them. Some of the main legal concerns for women and girls over this past year are detailed here.

Women’s safety was further compromised

The ‘shadow pandemic’ of family violence seen around the world since the onset of COVID has also been felt in Victoria, as greater financial, employment, health and housing insecurity and social isolation measures make it easier for abusers to control and harm victim-survivors – overwhelmingly female. The public health response to COVID-19 also placed women at increased risk as families spent longer periods of sustained time together, abusers had new abilities to restrict their partners’ movements, and victim-survivors were less able to flee and/or access community and social supports with the closure of schools and support services coupled with strict stay-at-home orders.

Family violence is first and foremost a safety issue, but the legal system plays a fundamental role in creating and enforcing the formal structures that keep women and children safe and prevents abusers from causing further harm. As the legal system transitions towards COVID Normal, it is vital to ensure that appropriate and adequate support is available to victim-survivors, including through improved accessibility of courts and legal assistance services.

Employment protections are weakening

The impact of COVID-19 has also exposed the weakness in Australia’s employment protection system for the many women employed in insecure work arrangements and casualised workforces such as the childcare, hospitality and cleaning industries. Australia’s workplace protections assume a traditional, full-time, permanent employer-employee relationship, and fail to protect the increasing number of workers employed in alternative arrangements.

Casual workers were among the most immediately and significantly affected by COVID-19 and related restrictions. Having no legal right to ongoing work, many were fired, with no entitlement to leave being paid out to cushion the financial impact. This meant it was much easier for employers to fire and replace staff who, for example, were unable to work because their child had been sent home from childcare due to a runny nose. In addition, caregivers (most commonly women), experienced elevated levels of discrimination by their employers as they were in the impossible positon of having to juggle work with carer responsibilities and the expectation of remote learning all within the confines of their home.

Women in prison were isolated

Women in Victoria’s prisons are one of the most vulnerable cohorts in the community with disproportionate experiences of victimisation from family violence and sexual abuse, mental illness, substance addiction, poverty and housing insecurity. Women in prison are acutely vulnerable to the physical health risks of COVID-19, but also to adverse wellbeing and human rights consequences caused by COVID-related restrictions.

The Victorian Government’s response to the risk of COVID-19 entering prisons has been to introduce prevention and control measures across all prisons, including suspending face-to-face personal and professional visits and isolating all prisoners received in Protective Quarantine Units (PQUs) for 14 days. While this was no doubt successful in avoiding the spread of COVID-19 through Victoria’s prison population, it made it challenging for some mothers and carers in prison to remain meaningfully connected with their children through remote visits, especially babies and young children who have less ability to use and understand digital communication technologies. In addition, the suspension of personal visits, along with technological issues and cyclical lockdowns in prison made it difficult for women, particularly Aboriginal women, to maintain contact with children subject to child protection orders.

Further, many women entering the mandatory 14 days in the PQUs have recently been in violent relationships and were experiencing a period of particular vulnerability. For the estimated 90% of women in prison who are victim-survivors, being placed in PQUs and in isolation can compound their trauma and in many instances mirror previous experiences of surveillance and control.

A Just and Equitable COVID Recovery

The plan for A Just and Equitable COVID Recovery sets out the Community Legal Centre sector’s recommendations that seek to fill the gaps in our social support system and embed protections for the most disadvantaged members of our community, to ensure that no one gets left behind in the transition to the ‘new normal’.

A just and equitable recovery must:

expand and entrench vital protections for financially disadvantaged Victorians
improve the fairness and resilience of our housing systems
make sure no workers are left behind in Victoria’s economic rebuild
embed access to justice for all victim-survivors of family violence and build on best practice legal supports in measures to respond to the ‘shadow pandemic’
protect the welfare and human rights of people in prison throughout the COVID recovery, and move towards a safer prison system
protect children and young people impacted by the crisis and keep them out of the justice system

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed fault-lines running through society, both in Victoria and around the world. As a public health crisis, the elderly and the immunocompromised have been the most vulnerable to the pandemic’s dangers – but as the catalyst for swift and comprehensive changes to how our world works, and as a profound economic shock, other groups of people within our community including girls, women and young people have been the hardest hit.

Girls, women and young people are at significant risk of being left behind as Victoria enters the recovery period unless focused and concerted efforts are made by government to repair these cracks in our social support system.

This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.

Posted by @SusanMaury

Pandemic impacts on women: Insights from community law