In a study titled “Treated like furniture: Gender-based violence and Covid-19 response in Southern Africa”, released on Tuesday, the NGO found that during the Covid-19 lockdown imposed by southern African countries, some homes across the region became enclaves of cruelty, rape and violence for women and girls trapped with abusive family members and nowhere to report or escape the danger.
Zambia was the only country that recorded a slight decrease in gender-based violence during the national lockdown compared with the same period in 2019. In Mozambique, civil society organisations received unusually high numbers of domestic violence cases after the start of the state of emergency in March 2020. In one case, a man killed his wife and then himself on June 6 in Matola district, Maputo province.