For now, home is the mandatory place of confinement to avoid the spread of COVID-19. However, the idea of ​​the home as an intimate, serene and safe space is not always the same for many women and girls. What happens to those women and girls who are not safe there; where else would they be safe? How do we get inside their homes to stop gender violence in these times of confinement and limited contact?

Peru is one of the countries with the highest rates of gender violence in the world. According to official data, 7 out of 10 women in this country have suffered violence at some time in their lives and it is mainly in their homes where the most serious forms of insecurity and violence occur. This reality becomes more visible and much more worrying during the lockdown. In only the first six days of this measure, taken to flatten Peru’s curve, 2,463 complaints of violence against women and family group members were registered on the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations’ Line 100. Thus, unfortunately, the measures aimed at protecting people from the coronavirus mean that many women and girls are forced to live with their aggressor.

Although this current lockdown represents an even greater challenge for reaching out to these households, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is implementing an integrated response that reactivates our networks and joins with our long-term partners to fight against gender violence in the country. Local governments, police stations, private companies, and of course, the community, which is always a valuable motor for each of our initiatives, are joining together to respond to domestic violence, which has been described by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “a global health problem with pandemic proportions.”

It has never been easy to reach these intimate spaces and, according to the National Observatory of violence against women and members of the family group, only 30% of female victims report these events. If before the quarantine violence was a problem that was difficult to talk about outside the home, today, during this situation, where doors are literally closed, we have to redouble our efforts.

In times of quarantine we are reaching out to families with messages of support, information and innovative solutions that help prevent gender-based violence and femicide during the emergency situation, working in close coordination with the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations in the districts of Lima, Villa El Salvador and San Juan de Miraflores.

One of these solutions is to include messages regarding equality and violence prevention in the food baskets that are being delivered by local governments. This has helped us go into more than 4,000 homes to inform victims or possible victims about where they can go, what emergency numbers to call and if they can leave in case of assaults. Families also become aware of the importance of gender equality, co-responsibility and sharing care work.

In parallel, we work with those who are on the front line responding to this pandemic: the solid waste collectors and the Peruvian National Police. They are invisible heroes and heroines that today, more than ever, are essential for maintaining order, health and a bond with families in quarantine. Both are being strengthened and trained on issues related to gender violence, masculinities and co-responsibility, in order to bring State domestic violence care services closer to citizens.

Furthermore, waste collection trucks will broadcast messages on equality and violence prevention through loudspeakers, which will reach out to households along their routes. This will be important to connect with women who, due to gender biases and roles, assume domestic tasks such as taking out the trash. Also, police stations will employ a protocol that uses geo-referenced monitoring of measures related to victim protection, in order to ensure that the measures are being complied with. They will also implement a map that shows the areas with the highest incidence of domestic violence.

All these efforts require the participation of the community. For this reason, we are reactivating both community support and private sector networks to have one integrated network that can reach the largest number possible of women and families in lockdown. This will also help build bridges between victims, witnesses of violence and violence response services, all with the aim of improving early response and guaranteeing the exercise of citizens' rights.

We are aware that this emergency requires new ways of organizing, interacting and protecting ourselves against a virus that, day by day, takes more lives. At UNDP, we work with creativity, innovation and commitment, to implement solutions to confront these new times; solutions that protect women and girls, because, during this emergency, their rights should not ever be under lockdown.