Sask. has the worst intimate partner violence rate of any province. Here's what advocates say needs to happen
CBC
WARNING: This story contains graphic details of violence.
Shirley Parkinson's sister Mariann Rich still remembers the knots in her stomach that would form as her sister talked about her husband's temper.
Parkinson told Rich she had "learned how to not set him off" and would question her own behaviour as his became more unpredictable.
"You made me do this," Donald Parkinson would say to Shirley.
"Maybe I'm crazy," she would say to her sister.
These stories made Rich uneasy, but the two of them never imagined the growing tension would escalate to murder. Looking back, Rich knows the warning signs were there.
Parkinson's husband of 27 years bludgeoned her to death while she was sleeping in their rural home. Then he killed himself. It happened in 2014.
For Rich, the pain is still raw with every new missed milestone that passes. Her sister never made it to 60 and never got to meet her first grandson.
"It's almost seven-and-a-half years later, and there are times when it feels just like yesterday because it has such a huge emotional impact," Rich said. "The grief doesn't go away, and what really upsets me is to know other families are going through the same thing."
Rich said she knows of other cases of people murdering their spouses in the area in the last five years. These anecdotal stories are backed up by statistics.
CBC spent 16 months compiling and analyzing data on intimate partner homicides across Canada from January 2015 to June 2020 for the investigative series Deadly Relationships.
There were at least 37 intimate partner homicide victims in Saskatchewan during that time. At least 17 of them were Indigenous and 29 were female.
Saskatchewan has the highest rate of reported intimate partner violence among all provinces and more than double the national rate, according to Statistics Canada's most recent data.
Rich said she is frustrated by the high rates because both provincial and federal governments could do things to bring them down.
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