Tackling the social conditions of abuse

Many myths have circulated about the COVID-19 pandemic, a novel flu pandemic that, at the time of writing, has had a global impact for two years. One of those myths, now well documented, was that ‘we are all in this together’. This was a phrase adopted by the current British Conservative politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. Intending to acknowledge that the virus does not discriminate, Sunak, who was announcing his first economic budget for the country at the start of the first UK national ‘lockdown’, wanted to let the public know that the British government wouldn't either. Over the past two years, a polyphony of voices have pointed out that, actually, we weren't all in this together. People living in poorer areas of the UK were nearly four times more likely to die from the virus than people living in affluent areas (Suleman et al, 2021). British Black Africans and British Pakistanis were two and a half times more likely to die from the virus than white British people (Platt and Warwick, 2020). These figures revealed huge disparities in how the virus impacted communities across the UK, dependent on social class, ethnicity or disability.

They also revealed something else: many driving forces of this disparity were structural and systemic in nature (we will return to a definition of these terms). People living in poorer areas were not simply dying at higher rates because they were poor but because they were more likely to be exposed to the virus, working in essential jobs that continued through the most virulent stages of the pandemic. British Black Africans and Pakistanis account for a significant proportion of the British working class, and many were essential workers and are frontline health and social care workers (ONS, 2020). Those living in poorer areas had fewer options for self-isolation, with lower household incomes and overcrowded housing making staying home from work, or isolating from family members, harder. Many did stay at home despite these additional challenges (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2021: 21).

These structural inequalities determined who was most exposed to the virus and least protected from getting sick, and also who was least protected from getting sacked (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2021: 36), or, on top of that, from being charged with a litany of new ‘COVID’ offences introduced through a series of emergency parliamentary measures.