Gendered and Coercive Violence during COVID-19: An Interactional and Organizational Analysis of Public Health Guidance

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 16. Gender and Sexual Violence

Abstract

How do public health mandates reshape coercive violence within intimate relationships and the organizations designed to support survivors? We introduce an interactional–organizational framework of coercive violence to examine how state-sponsored public health guidance can be mobilized—intentionally and unintentionally—as a mechanism of control over women. While shelter-in-place (SIP) policies during the COVID-19 pandemic were implemented to protect public health, they also restructured the material and institutional conditions under which intimate partner violence (IPV) unfolded. Drawing on 24 in-depth interviews conducted between 2020 and 2024 with IPV survivors and service providers in the San Francisco Bay Area, we examine how pandemic-related public health mandates operated at two levels. At the interactional level, abusive partners leveraged SIP restrictions, reduced shelter capacity, and health-based messaging to intensify economic abuse, restrict mobility, and deepen survivors’ social isolation. Public health guidance became a discursive and structural resource that enabled abusers to consolidate coercive control. At the organizational level, occupancy limits, quarantine requirements, and shifting safety protocols constrained shelter capacity and reshaped service delivery. Although essential for reducing viral transmission, these measures introduced new forms of institutional constraint, limiting survivor autonomy and, in some cases, narrowing pathways to safety. Our findings demonstrate that coercive control operates not only through interpersonal behaviors but also through organizational practices structured by state policy. Public health mandates did not create coercive violence; rather, they reconfigured the conditions under which it could be enacted. By integrating interactional and organizational analysis, this study advances theories of coercive violence and highlights how crisis governance can inadvertently reshape survivors’ access to safety and support.

Authors

• Bethany J. Nichols, Stanford University

• Alison Dahl Crossley, Stanford University

• Adrian Daub, Stanford University