‘How to hit a woman so no one knows’ was googled 165m times in 2020, report reveals

Team Udayavani, Apr 30, 2021, 3:00 PM IST

Source: Unsplash

During the COVID-19-induced lockdowns around the world last year, the number of domestic abuse cases increased drastically.

As per a study published in the journal ‘Taylor and Francis,’ the rise in domestic abuse could be backed by Google searches of some questions in 2020.

Katerina Standish, the study’s author serves as the deputy director and senior lecturer at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

The study observed Google searches in the US and revealed that there were at least six areas of interest – precarity and insecurity, despondency and helplessness, indicative male violence and intentional male violence.

Results showed a spike from 31% to 106% in 2020.

‘How to control your woman’ and ‘how to hit a woman so no one knows’ were each googled 165 million times and ‘I am going to kill her when she gets home’ was googled 178 million times.

There were other searches which determined indicative male violence, such as – ‘he will kill me’ which was googled 107 million times while ‘he beats me up’ was searched for 320 million times.

Standish wrote in the introduction of her study, “Each one of these ‘rounded’ numbers results from a person inputting these search terms into the web search 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.”