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.