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.
L’épidémie de COVID-19 et les inondations de juillet 2021 sont des évènements dramatiques mais riches d’enseignement : ces deux catastrophes ont mis à l’épreuve le système de gestion des risques que nous avons établi au cours des dernières décennies pour assurer une protection de la société face aux menaces de natures diverses : industrielles, environnementales, terroristes, etc. La COVID-19 a pris de court de nombreux pays européens qui se pensaient à l’abri des risques épidémiques, tandis que les pluies torrentielles ont presque submergé la vallée de la Vesdre. Ces deux catastrophes imposent aux auteures une prise de recul, pour réfléchir aux transformations profondes qu’elles provoquent en matière de gestion de crise et de planification d’urgence pour ouvrir de nouvelles lignes de recherche et lancer des pistes de réformes dans ce secteur qu’elles étudient depuis plus de dix ans.
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