CBC findings on intimate-partner homicides sadly familiar to local support workers

WARNING: This story contains graphic details of violence. 

Nancy Smith has met many women and children fleeing abuse in decades working at Interval House of Hamilton, a shelter for women and children.

She also has known women who reported domestic abuse and were later killed; some of whom predicted such an outcome themselves.

"One thing I have learned is that if a woman believes [her abuser] is capable of killing her and [that] he will kill her, she's at extreme risk," says Smith, who has served as Interval House's executive director for the past six years.

The organization uses a research-based danger assessment tool to help assess its clients' risk level, but no matter their score, Smith always takes it seriously if she gets a "yes" to the question "Do you believe he is capable of killing you?"

"If a woman says yes, I'll say, 'How do you think he would do it?'," Smith recounted. "One woman said, 'He's going to jam sleeping pills down my throat to make it look like a suicide.' Days later, she was found [dead] in her apartment and it was classified as a suicide."

Other warning signs on that assessment tool, created by Jacquelyn Campbell of Johns Hopkins University, include coercive control, previous assaults and a recent separation — risk factors CBC also identified in a lengthy investigation into intimate-partner homicides across Canada. 

Findings from CBC's investigation, Deadly Relationships, were published Monday as Canada marks National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.

Deadly Relationships is the result of a 16-month CBC investigation compiling and analyzing intimate partner homicides across Canada between January 2015 and June 2020. The investigation looked at 392 cases of intimate-partner homicide from across Canada. (A total of 488 partner homicides were reported by Statistics Canada in the same period.)

CBC found that in more than a third of cases, there was at least one warning sign prior to the murder. The most common were recent separations (around 25 per cent), exercising coercive control over the victim (15 per cent) and previous reports to police (15 per cent). Nearly all of the accused who showed warning signs, 97 per cent were men. 

The 16-month investigation involved analyzing data from Freedom of Information and Access to Information requests to police services serving more than 100,000 people. In British Columbia and Quebec, the information was available directly from the justice ministries. Not all police services provided the same information, and some provided none, so the findings are likely underestimated. 

The CBC investigation comes on the heels of a report released Dec. 1 that showed as many as 58 women and girls were killed in Ontario during the past year, a time period subsequent to the one CBC studied. The Annual Femicide List, compiled by the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses and researchers at the University of Guelph says the victims ranged in age between two and 89.

The CBC investigation also found:

Sandra Montour, executive director of Ganohkwasra Family Assault Support Services on Six Nations of the Grand River, says the findings are awful, but sadly, they align with what she sees in her work.