In a blog post for the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI), Council researchers Chi-Chi Undie, Sanyukta Mathur, Nicole Haberland, Isabel Vieitez, and Julie Pulerwitz highlight the tension between the need to gather data to support women facing unprecedented vulnerability in the COVID-19 pandemic, and the reality that the very act of data collection may heighten risk. They also present opportunities for ethical sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) data collection during the pandemic.
Addressing both the recently reported spikes in SGBV incidents since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rigorous ethical measures in SGBV data collection to ensure the safety of survivors, the authors underscore the potential of Implementation science – and operations research, in particular in providing data collection options that are sufficiently nimble and flexible to meet the ethical requirements of SGBV research in the time of COVID-19, while providing built-in utilization of that research to support survivors.