Nearing the end of March Break, a woman gets a call from her ex. He says he’s going to keep the kids past his regularly scheduled access, adding: “and I don’t think there’s much you can do because the courts aren’t open.”

Another woman who normally exchanges her children at a police station over her fear of harassment gets an email from her ex saying, plans have changed and he’ll drop the kids at her home — or “I’ll just keep them.”

These are just two real scenarios recently relayed to Luke’s Place, a service for women and children in abusive relationships, amid these new times of social distancing and self-isolation.

And then, more women in abusive relationships are now self-isolating and hunkered down in the same home as their abusers, because of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many of these women “either haven’t made a plan to leave yet or are at the very early stages of thinking through that,” said Pamela Cross, legal director at Luke’s Place, which is based in Oshawa.

Social distancing measures like school closures or workplaces encouraging or requiring people to work from home risk creating “invisible victims” out of women now “in a situation where the partner has relatively unlimited access to them in the private location of the home,” Cross said.

“I think we sort of feel like this is a bit of the calm before the storm,” she said.

Amid COVID-19, domestic violence support agencies and legal clinics across the GTA are now operating mostly in virtual spaces as they brace for an increase in domestic violence and custody issues.

In the days after the prime minister told Canadians to stay home, calls to Toronto’s Barbara Schlifer Commemorative Clinic dropped off for a few days, then picked up again. Staff at the clinic are expecting a further increase in traffic — above its usual 50 to 60 calls per day — similar to what has happened in other countries deeper into the pandemic.

“We’re trying to keep the services as available as possible and actually enhancing them,” said Deepa Mattoo, executive director of the legal clinic, which also offers counselling and interpreter services.

For now, emergency staff are still staffing the clinic’s physical space for walk-ins. Everything else is by phone and video conferencing, and staff are doing “proactive check-ins” with some clients to make sure they’re not isolated and alone, Mattoo said.

Crime experts say the circumstances for intimate-partner violence are heightened by social distancing measures, and organizations and all levels of government need to do everything they can to stop it, now.

That could mean raising awareness about risk factors, to providing online resources to more funding for local services. The federal government announced last week that it would provide $50 million to organizations supporting women fleeing domestic violence and sexual assault.

Felix Munger, who manages the Canadian Municipal Network on Crime Prevention, said he’s concerned both about families in which there is already a history of abuse and the pandemic is putting on new stresses, including loss of income, layoffs, anxiety about the future and alcohol abuse.

“For some people in more difficult home environments, being able to go outside, to work, is a reprieve from fairly difficult, tense situations,” Munger said.

“Then you layer on top the instability — it’s a bit of a perfect storm: economic insecurity and personal insecurity with close quarters, with kids at home.”

For any woman in an abusive relationship or contested custody dispute — or both — the systems they face are difficult to navigate, and now must be done virtually.

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Even the courts are closed except for “urgent” cases.

“The situation is grim for a lot of people and for us as well,” Mattoo said. “This is a completely new world order, to actually make yourself and your services available in a safe way for the workers and the lawyers and the counsellors and the interpreters on the team, while also making sure that the clients are getting the service is a completely new way to look at work.”

The decision to suspend most court activity “makes perfect sense in terms of trying to limit the spread of COVID- 19,” Cross said. But for a woman whose family court case has just started, while she and her children may be out of the house, courts likely won’t consider the matter “urgent,” she said.

“So, unless and until my partner does something to harm me or the kids, or does something like not return the children from an access visit, my case has shut down. And we don’t really know when those cases are going to get back on the docket,” Cross said. “So (they’re) left in a state of sort of limbo.”

It’s a dangerous situation, she said, because “abuse escalates at the time of separation. It’s the time period when women are at the highest risk of being killed by their partner.”

Luke’s Place serves an average of 100 women per week, many of whom are provided with ongoing service. In 2019, the agency served more than 880 women in total.

It operates a free legal clinic with 20 pro bono lawyers that it is continuing to operate. Wednesday was the first day the clinic went entirely virtual, using telephone and Zoom for video conferencing, Cross said.

“The day went very well,” said Cross. “We did, however, have one client who was unable to participate in her appointment because the abuser was in the home with her. And it’s not safe for her to have that appointment while the abuser can hear or see what it is that’s going on.”

For that woman, an alternate plan is being set up.

Luke’s is also working with the Law Society of Ontario and the Ontario Bar Association, and preparing resources for lawyers unfamiliar with family law to help identify “red flags when a custody case is urgent as opposed to simply important,” Cross said.

“We’re communicating jointly out across the province, just so that people know there are options that are specialized for survivors of family violence, and here’s how you get them, they’re a phone call away.”