The Covid-19 pandemic and retrenchments in South Africa: Implications for inter-gender relations

Abstract

Due to the disruption of activities across the globe by the COVID-19 pandemic, so many consequences were predicted. Prominent amongst these were unprecedented job losses and an increase in gender-based violence. These were based on the assumptions that due to the lockdown (i) many people will lose jobs, and (ii) people will be constrained to stay together and as a result, gender-based violence will escalate. On the one hand, South Africa was one of the countries that experienced a high incidence of the pandemic and implemented very strict lockdown measures to contain it with relative success. On the other, the country is also ranked high amongst those with records of gender-based violence in normal times. This paper investigated whether retrenchments led to an increase in gender-based violence during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown in South  Africa. It focused between March and June 2020 described as a period of the "hard-lockdown" in the country. Based on our analysis of available  data, we found out that many intervening variables interacted with the impacts of the pandemic. We also observed that these may have moderated behaviours that influenced inter-gender relations; as a result, gender-based violence appeared not to have increased as speculated in the country during the period under review.

Keywords: South Africa, COVID-19 pandemic, Retrenchments, Inter-gender relations, Gender-based violence, protection relief, lockdown