Homicide risk rising for domestic violence victims in Alberta

“If you’re coming to a shelter that means you’re hiding for your life pretty much or having to get away from a potentially lethal situation,” said Carvalho. “That’s what we see on a daily basis, so if we’re able to keep people safer that’s great.”

The findings were released from all 39 members of the ACWS and the risk of domestic homicide is higher than at any time over the previous seven years.

Carvalho added the methods of inflicting that violence are also troubling.

“We’re also seeing a lot more increased cases of strangulation and choking and those kind of things,” she said. “So, I think the types of violence sometimes are changing or getting much more severe. So, definitely there’s been a lot of that as a concern for us as well.”

According to ACWS’ research, over 10,000 women, children and seniors required shelters in 2018-19 and over 23,000 were turned away due to a lack of capacity across the province with 1,825 of those coming in southern Alberta.

For many of those at risk of being potentially murdered, Carvalho said it has a major impact on the mental well being of those abused and their families.

“We definitely see that their mental health is compromised because they’ve been living in crisis and in sort of a ‘fight or flight’ response for so long,” she said. “We definitely see the impact on the children, that they’ve been living with that as well.”

In the hopes of lowering that risk moving forward, the local shelter is pushing for education as their first step.

“So many times in terms of shelter services you don’t know about it until you need to know about it,” said Carvalho. “But, there’s so many times I think that you can be helpful to somebody. We’re really trying to do things like even in the schools be in there earlier, get into those CALM classes, talk about dating violence, what does that look like, start planting those seeds really early on.”

Carvalho said they’re also leaning on their community partners and their established programming.

Following a domestic homicide in the city five years ago, the shelter and Medicine Hat Police Service partnered on creating the ‘Safe Families Intervention Team’ which sees officers reach out to those reporting domestic violence and connecting them to shelter staff.

Over those five years, Carvalho said they’ve seen incredible growth in the program.

“When we decided to go off-site to the police station, our case loads tripled in numbers,” she said. “That really was an ‘ah-ha’ moment for us that we realized there were a lot of people out there who thought that if you didn’t need shelter services, you couldn’t access our services. So, we really did a bit of a shift in paradigm to make sure that people understood you don’t have to access the physical shelter, but there’s other ways you can safety plan and still keep yourself safe.”

Carvalho said she is continuing to advocate for the creation of a national action plan to end violence against women, while Medicine Hat Police reported zero homicides in all of 2019.

by Scott Roblin

Homicide risk rising for domestic violence victims in Alberta

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