Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law, Political Science and Criminology, University of Liège, 4000 Liège, Belgium.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 Mar 2;20(5):4461. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20054461.
Belgian authorities, like most authorities in European countries, resorted to unprecedented measures in response to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 and May 2022. This exceptional context highlighted the issue of intimate partner violence (IPV) in an unprecedented way. At a time when many other issues are being put on hold, IPV is being brought to the fore. This article investigated the processes that have led to increasing political attention to domestic violence in Belgium. To this end, a media analysis and a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted. The materials, collected and analyzed by mobilizing the framework of Kingdon's streams theory, allowed us to present the agenda-setting process in its complexity and the COVID-19 as a policy window. The main policy entrepreneurs were NGOs and French-speaking feminist women politicians. Together, they rapidly mobilized sufficient resources to implement public intervention that had already been proposed in the preceding years, but which had been waiting for funding. By doing so, they responded during the peak of the pandemic to requests and needs that had already been expressed in a "non-crisis" context.
比利时当局与欧洲各国的大多数当局一样，在 2020 年 3 月至 2022 年 5 月期间为应对 COVID-19 大流行采取了前所未有的措施。这种特殊情况以一种前所未有的方式突出了亲密伴侣暴力（IPV）问题。在许多其他问题被搁置的时候，IPV 被提上了议程。本文研究了导致比利时对家庭暴力问题日益关注的过程。为此，进行了媒体分析和一系列半结构化访谈。通过调动金登的流理论框架收集和分析的材料，使我们能够以复杂的方式呈现设定议程的过程，以及 COVID-19 作为政策窗口。主要的政策企业家是非政府组织和说法语的女权主义女性政治家。他们共同迅速调动了足够的资源来实施在前几年已经提出但一直等待资金的公共干预措施。通过这样做，他们在大流行高峰期回应了已经在“非危机”背景下表达的需求。
