Book Description

When cases of domestic violence spiked during the COVID-19 lockdowns, terror spread among potential victims, while governments that enforced the isolation seemed helpless to address the damages. Vulnerable partners, children, and parents were hostage to possible perpetrators, given the risks of retaliation at home and the danger of death by contamination in shelters. The alarm raises questions about under-examined triggers for violence against others and oneself. One common trigger is boredom. It is the elephant in the room, a known stressor in institutional settings–schools, prisons, and military installations–and otherwise out of focus despite the ubiquity of gender-based violence. Detecting the ravages of boredom in apparently safe domestic settings hints at a range of meanings for the word and a web of personal and collective dysfunctions, including anxiety, depression, feelings of worthlessness and anomie. Conventional remedies for these challenges do not address the escalating rates of violence to oneself and to others. Their evident ineffectiveness during the crisis laid bare structural flaws in standard human development strategies which span home and school environments, the law, and approaches to mental health. A major flaw has been the narrow perspectives of one or another discipline, when the dangers are interrelated and demand multidisciplinary approaches. Chronic violence and alarming rates of depression, before, during, and after the pandemic, show failures of predictable perspectives and their recommendations even in “normal” conditions. The question of how authorities should react to harm done begs the question of how to prevent harm from happening. Prevention–rather than punishment for crimes or treatment for pathologies–has become a preferred approach for both legal and clinical interventions. To stop violence before it irrupts requires investigation into its causes, because treating the effects of aggression–evacuating victims, punishing perpetrators, counselling patients–addresses symptoms rather than diseases. Why was the lockdown a time of increased domestic violence? What accounts for recent spikes in teen suicides? What are the existing and possible tools for measuring boredom? Answers from experts stay within foreseeable observations about the loss of jobs, the increase of alcoholism, social media addiction, and psychological stress. These familiar answers do not lead beyond the description of pathological patterns. But different approaches may follow from attending to the under-examined danger of having nothing to do.