Intimate Violence in the Time of COVID: Feminist Semiotics of “Safe”

The proposed paper explores intimate violence during the initial weeks of the pandemic in Israel, from the start of the first lockdown to the easing and removal of restrictions. Based on the analysis of policy papers, parliamentary committee debates on COVID-19, court appeals, data presented by civil society and state institutions, and debate in the media, the paper traces the conditions that enabled the dialectic of presence/dissipation of intimate violence. The working premise of state officials in charge of managing the crisis, was that home is the safest space, that everyone has one to stay in, and that reducing human contact to cohabiting family members is the best way to preserve the public’s health. Despite the flow of data to the contrary, home and family formed the ideological infrastructure that was supposed to ensure the security of Israeli residents in the face of what was defined as a threat and presented with militaristic terminology. Since feminist effort to make intimate violence a common concern has focused (successfully) in the allocation of budgets, programs, and manpower, the complete disregard for the phenomenon manifested in epidemic related policy, calls for a reckoning. Applying feminist and semiotic reading to the concepts of family, home and security, the paper traces the ideological prescriptions in the regulation of public and private spheres.