59 ideas to stop domestic violence homicide

March 31, 2016 10:40 AM

Survivors, advocates and experts suggest practical ideas to end murders of intimate partners. (Single link HuffPo)
posted by bearwife (21 comments total)

I do not know how they decided the order of the items, but while CJS and gun law reforms might mitigate DV homicide somewhat, only comprehensive education and significant societal reform can stop it.

Even on this list, most of these things lay the responsibility of survival on the victim (better services, better legal recourse, etc), or punishment after-the-fact, instead of focusing on the the people perpetrating the abuse, to change their behavior (or raise them differently, so there's nothing that needs to be changed).
posted by Gorgik at 11:33 AM on March 31, 2016 [6 favorites]

One thing many people can do is financially support local survivor lead organizations, such as The Network La Red in New England.
posted by cubby at 11:40 AM on March 31, 2016

I do not know how they decided the order of the items, but while CJS and gun law reforms might mitigate DV homicide somewhat, only comprehensive education and significant societal reform can stop it.

I mean, I get what you're saying, but the CJS and gun reform is a hell of a lot more achievable than fixing society. Also, making changes like that helps change society anyway.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:41 AM on March 31, 2016 [12 favorites]

I'm sorry for not being more articulate. Yesterday I went to a memorial for a DV homicide victim in Seattle, and I'm still upset. This list is good, and I want more resources, harsher punishments, etc. Nome of these things would have helped last week, though. As long as toxic masculinity is so deeply entrenched and ignored (by and large), other things feel like Band-Aids.
posted by Gorgik at 11:42 AM on March 31, 2016 [8 favorites]

I suspect that changing the behavior of the abusers is significantly more complex and requires them to want to change. Similarly, fixing the root causes of how people are raised to become abusers is non-trivial.

This was 59 practical (and I assume likely effective) things to do.

Some of the 59 practical things sadly seem less likely to occur (more money for lawyers, anything (even temporarily) blocking/delaying access to handguns) due to social issues actively blocking them. Some of the things such as better police training (multiple points imply this) along with judge training (I.E. no light sentences for "only" choking her a little) seem like they'd be much more distasteful for people to fight against.
posted by nobeagle at 11:43 AM on March 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

I liked the idea about removing the abuser, rather than the abused having to go to a shelter. A friend of mine, C., who was killed by her husband along with her 13-year-old son a couple of years ago, struggled to leave him in part because she had invested so much in her home: extensive gardens where she raised much of her family's food, for instance. The idea of losing that, and losing it to her abuser, was very hard for her to stomach. She did eventually leave that home, and was starting over in a new place at the time of her murder.

One I would add is the possibility for third parties to petition courts for restraining orders. C let her ex-husband manipulate her into lifting the restraining order against him, in part by suggesting that it was holding him back in his job (he sold guns at a major sporting-goods store), and that if the order were lifted, he would be able to take a position in another state. He essentially bribed her with the promise of getting out of her life and having more income to pay child support.

Her closest friends were begging her to reinstate it. They had gotten the forms and filled them out—they just needed her signature and a visit to the courthouse to file. But she wouldn't or couldn't do it. They were working to set things up so that all the obstacles she cited were cleared away: they would set up childcare for her younger kids (who were, thank god, at their grandparents' the night of the murders), they would drive her there, etc. They didn't get the chance to do it. It makes me wonder about the possibility of a situation where they could have gone to the court and petitioned to have the order reinstated even though C was unable to act in her own best interest.

The husband's guns had been surrendered to the police when the restraining order was in place. The police officer in charge of these things stretched the law to its breaking point, using fake bureaucratic snafus and artificially long turn-around times to keep the guns out of his hands, while urging C's friends to please get her to refile for it.

As far as I can tell from the timeline, he went directly to her house after getting his guns back from the police, where he killed her and her son, and then himself. A lot of people tried their best to keep C. safe, including police officers, and I want to honor that. But it has troubled me that the police, knowing they'd just given guns back to an abuser (they'd been to the house during a shooting incident before), didn't take steps like posting someone in front of her house to watch out for him. Her death, and her son's, were so predictable that it ought to have somehow triggered protective activity that did not depend on her, I don't know, having time to call 911 before she died or something. I have no idea how such a thing would work, exactly, but it seems to me like there ought to somehow have been another option once the guns were in his hand than for the police to stand back and wait for it to play out.
posted by not that girl at 11:46 AM on March 31, 2016 [49 favorites]

Personally, I like the idea of one strike, no matter how small, and abusers are out, thrown in a hole, forever, but I suppose that wouldn't fly. But I lost a childhood friend in a DV homicide and I cannot be any sort of logical or objective about this topic. There does really really need to be a stronger system of restraint for abusers. The man who murdered my friend was awaiting trial, out on bail, for 8 charges of domestic abuse against his ex girlfriend and my friend also had current charges and a restraining order against him. He was due in court in July, and he murdered her in May. She had left him when he came and beat her to death. Why was he even out on the streets, let alone able to get anywhere near her? What good did that restraining order even do? It's never made sense to me that she was the one who had to watch out for danger, when she had done nothing wrong.

We absolutely need more education for bystanders, too. No one called the police while he was beating her and people would have heard. Why?

How many other surviving friends and family can tell this exact same story? Far too many.

Thank you for posting this, Bearwife.
posted by john_snow at 12:03 PM on March 31, 2016 [11 favorites]

The next time you upgrade your cell phone, you can always donate your old one to a shelter. Being able to communicate safely is a pretty key aspect of many folks' exiting an abusive situation. It's a simple thing that, in a worst case scenario, can literally save a life.
posted by trackofalljades at 12:07 PM on March 31, 2016 [7 favorites]

Get rid of guns?
posted by sfts2 at 1:07 PM on March 31, 2016 [9 favorites]

The only thing more depressing than the horror of domestic violence is the pain and suffering victims must endure in order to get away from their abusers. Our world is so deeply, deeply f'cked up. Thank you for posting this list. We need more people to be aware of these issues.
posted by pjsky at 1:32 PM on March 31, 2016

As to changing society, I did like the idea presented in one of the linked pieces about not putting the "reason" many abusers give for killing their spouses in the headline. Make it stop sounding like a one-off freak occurrence. This happens far too regularly and for the same reason- the women were being abused and the abuse escalated to homicide.
posted by Hactar at 1:38 PM on March 31, 2016 [5 favorites]

CJS and gun reform is a hell of a lot more achievable than fixing society

"fixing society" will help a _lot_ of problems. It would be very very difficult, but if everyone keeps throwing up their hands and saying it's "difficult" instead of just getting started, it's impossible. It's not impossible, though. Just get started.
posted by amtho at 1:39 PM on March 31, 2016 [2 favorites]

Get rid of guns?

That might not be effective as you might think. Australia has solid gun control, and abusers still manage to murder one woman a week.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 2:57 PM on March 31, 2016 [4 favorites]

In Victoria (Australia ), a Royal Commission into Family Violence (an expert review of the issue) just handed down its findings on domestic violence prevention. Unsurprisingly, it's complicated and there aren't any easy solutions. But the government accepted all of the recommendations and will now work out how to fund them.
posted by wilful at 3:48 PM on March 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

not putting the "reason" many abusers give for killing their spouses

Seriously. Treat it as a premeditated crime, the premeditation being the years of carefully calibrated control and violence that almost certainly led up to the murder. He wasn't "distraught", he didn't "just snap," it wasn't a "result" of something she did any more than terrorist attacks are a "result" of someone not going along with the terrorists' political program.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 4:08 PM on March 31, 2016 [8 favorites]

I've been listening to the podcast Real Crime Profiles - they're profilers from the FBI and Scotland Yard. They've been doing commentary on the People vs. OJ Simpson, and focusing on something the series doesn't really cover: domestic violence and intimate partner homicide.

They walk through Nicole's 911 calls and letters in microscopic detail, and to hear the difference between the laws in the UK compared to the laws in the US is troubling. They have laws against emotional abuse and stalking, and a registry for stalkers. They also have significantly less gun crime there, and much harsher penalties for it.

Then you look at the story of Cherelle Baldwin, and it's striking how freaking far we are from being able to provide victims with any help. She spent three years in jail while waiting out the "justice system" charging her with the murder of someone who was about to kill her. It's disgusting.

It's one more thing to add to the list of stuff we talk about in my classroom. I may be the only adult talking to them about these issues. That is disheartening, for sure.
posted by guster4lovers at 5:14 PM on March 31, 2016 [8 favorites]

I think this article was focusing on relatively simple, practical things we could do right now today.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:25 PM on March 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think this article was focusing on relatively simple, practical things we could do right now today.

Those are important, to be sure. Who's doing the other stuff, the long-term strategizing and bit-by-bit one-on-one work to make people less crazy?
posted by amtho at 6:53 PM on March 31, 2016

The victim still needs to go to work, still needs her kids to be in school, and those are both huge exposures to lethal violence. Remove the threat, not the threatened.

What this boils down to is her loosing her life, whether or not she dies by his hand. She can't keep the job, can't pay for housing, food, gas, phone, and is ultimately judged as the "unfit" parent because of it. Women who say 'why doesn't she just leave' are always asking from a position of privilege, even if that privilege is that of not being terrified or manipulated.
posted by BlueHorse at 7:12 PM on March 31, 2016 [4 favorites]

I think one thing a lot of the people on this list are forgetting is that an awful lot of domestic violence victims have convictions for domestic offenses themselves, because it is the police that decide who in a given situation is the victim. And you have prosecutors deferring to the police on that analysis, generally. So the suggestions on this list for first strike you're out, sex offender-like registry for domestic violence perpetrators, monitoring systems for those with convictions, and bars to social services for those with convictions are fairly likely to actually impair or endanger some or many of the very people they are intended to protect.

It also might be comforting to note that many things on this list are already in fact the law. For example, there is a federal ban on firearm possession for folks with any of a wide variety of state-level domestic violence convictions.
posted by likeatoaster at 6:01 AM on April 1, 2016

Please excuse the terrible title of this article. While ultimately the Patriarchy is the context for abuse, it doesn't excuse the individual choices of the abusers. Also, while all of it can't be solved at once, I suspect that a power law distribution applies to this issue as it does to many others. While a disturbing number of men abuse (and depressingly for a Y-chromosome holder, it is nearly always men), a large number of the crimes are committed by a more manageably-sized group of serial abusers that a program like that of High Point, NC can address.
posted by Octaviuz at 6:04 AM on April 1, 2016