Ramesh Chandra Nayak (Ph. D)
Department of Liberal Arts, Mody University of Science and Technology, Rajasthan, India
Email: [email protected]
Abstract: Started in November 2019, COVID-19 was proclaimed as a global pandemic by WHO on 11 March 2020 (Balkhair, 2020). Social distancing became the spread preventing norm. Police personnel were engaged to execute these norms, the engagement exposing them to open scrutiny of the pandemic. This engendered in them distress of high intensity. However, the stressors making particularly women police distressed during the second wave and the ways out in any such future eventuality seems missing in the existing literature. Therefore, this qualitative study was conducted to explore an empirical account of the stressors that negatively impacted the middle and low ranked women police who executed COVID norms on-field during the peak lockdown months in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, Odisha. Since the taxing
execution (both physical and mental) of their professional roles explicitly determined their distressful experiences, the findings have been seen through the lens of Goode’s (1960) role strain theory. The results indicate that the pandemic induced stressors negatively impacted both their professional and personal lives. Those specific stressors include over work-burden, alienation from family and community, fear of infection and infecting, withdrawal from providing family care services and linking health issues to the virus infection. Preventing such stressors as well as their consequent effects, in case any COVID like eventuality surfaces in future, is a need. This need can be fulfilled by the joint efforts of the government and the police administration by increasing the strength of civil policing and making situation appropriate
policies and arrangements like providing appropriate training, kits and so on before and during the situation.
Keywords: COVID-19; Women Police; Stressors; Distress; Future Roadmap.