‘How to control your woman’ googled 165 million times amid pandemic, reveals study

The study looked at Google searches in the US that was focused on six areas of interest–precarity and insecurity, despondency and helplessness, indicative male violence, and intentional male violence

Several surveys have shown a spike in domestic abuse cases amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with gender violence reaching an all-time. The same has been corroborated by a recent study that found that people even Googled similar topics in 2020.

Published in the journal Taylor and Francis, the study has been authored by Katerina Standish, deputy director and senior lecturer at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

The study looked at Google searches in the US that was focused on six areas of interest–precarity and insecurity, despondency and helplessness, indicative male violence, and intentional male violence, reported News18.

As per the study, the results showed a spike from 31 to 106 per cent in 2020.

“How to control your woman” and “how to hit a woman so no one knows” were each googled 165 million times. Male violence was indicated in many search results. “He will kill me” was Googled 107 million times, “he beats me up” was searched 320 million times. Besides, “help me, he won’t leave” was googled 1.22 billion times.

“Each one of these ‘rounded’ numbers results from a person in putting these search terms into the web engine. These figures are presented in full form because I did not want to lessen the visual impact of each individual entry into the search engine. Hundreds of millions of people are looking online for help and I wanted to reflect this COVID-19 reality,” the author wrote in her study.

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