(Posted 2023 July)
Covid-19 did much more than make the world sick. The global pandemic stretched our health, public health, and scientific resources and exposed gaps, including in those agencies and organizations that support people impacted by interpersonal violence. Fairfax County’s Domestic and Sexual Violence Services division and its partners take a look at the effect of the virus on the community, staffing, and morale in its Meeting the Movement and Beyond: A Post Pandemic Look report.
This report is a retrospective look at the state of sexual and domestic violence, human trafficking, and stalking in Fairfax County during the pandemic years 2020-2022, including data from fiscal year 2022. It highlights the many creative ways organizations and agencies worked tirelessly through the pandemic, amid the escalating severity of violence, to meet the needs of those impacted by gender-based violence.
Comparisons of data across agencies can be challenging. Data collection practices, types of information collected, breakdown of demographics, and even how organizations define violence can differ from agency to agency. The contributors to this report acknowledge these limitations as they celebrate this effort to highlight services provided by the Fairfax County community.
Research supports interpersonal violence as a significant public health crisis impacting millions of people each year, but the data collected for this report does not reflect incidence or prevalence rates of individuals and families in our community affected by this form of violence. This data gap can be attributed to multiple reasons, including: 1) Many individuals impacted by violence face personal and structural barriers to accessing formal services; 2) some people receive services from organizations unable to provide data; and 3) some received support from community organizations not considered traditional interpersonal violence service providers, such as local community centers, private mental health providers, or faith leaders. The authors of the report honor the voices and experiences represented in the data while recognizing the additional work necessary to include people not reflected in this report.
While the data in this report reflects a diversity of providers that serve the Fairfax community, there is more data available regarding domestic violence services than sexual violence services. These limitations illustrate the need to continue to expand the existing coordinated community response to broaden reach, to include nontraditional partners, and to deepen impact.
Despite these limitations, as this report makes clear, staff from agencies and organizations across the community demonstrated creativity in meeting basic needs of survivors and flexibility and ingenuity when it came to reaching clients. Despite the ongoing threat of the global pandemic, staff provided advocacy and case management, legal assistance, shelter, counseling, crisis intervention, and more in an environment completely virtual and unknown. This community repeatedly and creatively rose to the challenge.
View the full Meeting the Movement and Beyond: A Post Pandemic Look report.*
"Many helping professionals were frightened by the silence of survivors during the lockdown as we recognized the quandary they were in. They were between the ‘rock’ of the stay-at-home mandate for health reasons and the ‘hard place’ of knowing that, for safety reasons, staying at home was not at all in their best interest.”
*Fairfax County is committed to nondiscrimination on the basis of disability in all county programs, services and activities. To receive this information in an alternate format, call 703-324-5730 or TTY 711.
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