Each time a battered woman is killed we go over and over the circumstances of her death, examine whether she had reached out to the criminal justice system and whether the family utilized any of our domestic violence services. We try to determine in what ways the criminal justice and social services system helped or failed the battered woman. We try to figure out how the next fatality can be avoided.
Recently, there was a meeting of some domestic violence organizations to discuss the (then) latest death of a battered woman. The print and TV media were there and reported on a "new angle" for this all too frequent discussion. This new angle was predicated on the belief that the staff of a shelter had failed to protect a woman, by failing to offer her referrals to transitional housing when she left the shelter.
The facts in the case do not support this theory but, more importantly, we need to recognize this pointing-of-the-finger as one more way of blaming the victim for her own demise.
According to this hypothesis, the battered woman was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We have got to stop blaming the victim. If we want to bring an end to the needless and tragic deaths of battered women, we have got to stop looking at the battered woman's behavior and decisions to explain the problem. We must start holding the perpetrators of the violence accountable for their violent and destructive behavior.
We know that battered women are at the highest risk for serious injury or death after leaving the abusive relationship and we know that domestic violence is a pattern of threatening, abusive and coercive behaviors and yet the system continues to react as though each incident is unique and individual.
We must stop treating domestic violence like a social problem and start consistently treating it like the crime against society that it is. The criminal justice system must arrest, convict and punish these criminals. Perpetrators of domestic violence must be taught that hurting a family or household member is as much a crime as assaulting a stranger and that the consequences are severe. All too often the system knows these perpetrators by their histories of abusive incidents that went underpenalized.
We must support our shelters and their staffs. The nine shelters in Hawaii (one each on Maui, Kauai and Molokai; one each in Kona and Hilo; and three on Oahu, plus the military shelter) do a good job of serving thousands of battered women and their children each year.
State budget cuts for several years in the past resulted in the shelters having fewer staff and less resources to do the work, and yet the shelters continue to meet the demand, which seems endless and overwhelming. Shelters for battered women save lives. Shelter programs provide women with information, safety planning and support for making their own decisions.
Our collective hearts are broken each and every time a battered woman is murdered. We agonize over the details, we hold a march to honor her life, and we resolve to do a better job. Each death takes another fragment of our souls while the pain helps us renew our conviction to combat domestic violence, this dreadful killer of the people we love.