Prof. Will Story of the Department of Community and Behavioral Health is one of the recipients of $3.3 million from the Fogarty International Center to help low-resource nations respond to the challenge of COVID-19.

The Fogarty Center gave priority to COVID-19-related projects that address unique scientific questions associated with the pandemic in the low-resource country where the research is conducted.

Across the globe, an unintended consequence of COVID-19-related lockdowns has been an uptick in domestic violence. In India, roughly a third of married women experience intimate partner violence even during normal times, according to University of Iowa professor Dr. William Story.

When the pandemic began, Story’s colleagues, Dr. Nancy Angeline Gnanaselvam and Dr. Avita Johnson, were in the Bangalore suburbs collecting data on attitudes surrounding violence against women for a Fogarty-funded study. “We were able to interview women both before the COVID-19 lockdown and then after,” said Story. His supplemental grant from Fogarty will enable him to analyze this data and also re-interview some women given that initial trends were “curious.” “Intimate partner violence in some populations decreased after the lockdown, when we expected to see an increase,” he said.

Since many people moved during the pandemic, he noted, someone in an abusive relationship may have relocated away from their partner. With liquor stores and bars closed, alcohol consumption might have decreased. “It’s a complex pattern that we want to look into more deeply,” Story said.

Peri-urban neighborhoods—created by the settling of previously rural areas near cities—are appearing throughout Southeast Asia and in other regions. For this reason, Story believes his work will be applicable to settings beyond India. Story hopes his data will also inform his work developing an intervention for teens that addresses patterns of behavior around concepts of masculinity. The new funding will also support data analysis instruction for the research team at St. John’s Medical College in India.

“Supplements are great for being able to look at a question that maybe we weren’t expecting to come up during a study,” Story said. “COVID has put us in a position of asking extra questions and looking at things a little bit differently and I want to continue to practice that moving forward.” 

This article originally appeared on the Fogarty International Center website.