A report released last year by the Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence found a 181% increase in domestic violence fatalities from 2020 to 2021 in the Hoosier State.

According to a 2022 report published by The Lancet, the World Health Organization found that over one in four women experience domestic violence in their lifetimes.

16 News Now spoke with local victim advocates and court administrators about how survivors of domestic abuse can get the help they need.

“Domestic violence does not discriminate; it could be happening to someone you know at this time,” says Tiffany Gilliam, Domestic Violence Advocate in Lethality Prevention for the YWCA North Central Indiana. “It doesn’t care about race, socio-economic level, income level, education level, history, so this is something that can affect everybody.”

To better determine if abuse is severe and requires immediate intervention, the YWCA of North Central Indiana partnered with local police and started using the D.A.L.E. screening or Danger Assessment – Law Enforcement test.

Abuse takes many forms and doesn’t always fit nicely into one specific category.

“There are transportation issues,” says Emilie Stooke, Circuit Court Administrator for the St. Joseph Circuit Court. “There are work obligations, and there are language barriers. There are financial decisions that come into play; the parties may have children together, so it’s harder for them to up and leave as it would be someone who didn’t have children with their abuser.”

What happens when the local police show up after you or a loved one calls for a potential domestic violence crisis?

“When the police are called out to a scene, and there is a domestic violence altercation, they do what is called a D.A.L.E. assessment, and in those D.A.L.E. assessments, they will refer the victim to the YWCA or the FJC for their services,” Stooke explained.

Using 11 questions on the D.A.L.E. screening, the local YWCA identified around 450 high-risk cases in 2020, which increased to 550 in 2021.

These stats indicate that while there might be an increase in violence, because of programs in place locally, more survivors are being identified and provided assistance.

“And that’s why the education piece is so important, so once we’re able to give visibility to the range that abuse can look like, then that helps clients to identify where they were in their lives and how they were experiencing that,” Gilliam added.

The U.S. Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to allow a federal law stand that makes it a crime for people under domestic violence restraining orders to own firearms.

In February, a three judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans declared that the ban was unconstitutional, saying it violated the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the right to bear arms. It was the latest victory for gun rights advocates since a Supreme Court ruling last June granting a broad right for people to carry firearms outside the home.

The Supreme Court ruling announced a new test for assessing firearms laws, saying restrictions must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” and not simply advance an important government interest.

The Justice Department’s petition to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court was posted on Twitter late on Friday by Jake Charles, a law professor at Pepperdine University with expertise on gun control issues. It can take several days for a petition to be posted to the public docket.

“More than a million acts of domestic violence occur in the United States every year, and the presence of a firearm increases the chance that violence will escalate to homicide,” the petition reads.

The Justice Department said it was pursuing the Supreme Court appeal on a “highly expedited schedule” so the justices could potentially take up the case before the current term ends.

In its decision, the 5th Circuit panel, which was comprised of three Republican-appointed judges, threw out the guilty plea and six-year prison sentence for Zackey Rahimi, who admitted to possessing guns found in his Kennedale, Texas, home after prosecutors said he participated in five shootings in Dec. 2020 and Jan. 2021.

Rahimi had been under a restraining order since Feb. 2020, following his alleged assault of a former girlfriend.

Neither the Justice Department, nor the federal public defender representing Rahimi immediately responded to requests for comment.

Source: Gram Slattery and Nate Raymond, Reuters. Click here to view original post. 

A clinic in Surrey, B.C., that has long served victims of strangulation has dedicated a clinic for those services.

“We needed a specialty clinic where this could be looked at and people could feel supported,” said nurse practitioner Hannah Varto at Embrace Clinic, which since 2015 has provided services for strangulation victims.

“This gives me shivers even just saying it … people who’ve been strangled, primarily women, from their domestic partner, are at seven times the risk of being killed by their partner in the future.”

Previously a mobile clinic, Embrace secured a permanent location across Surrey Memorial Hospital in 2021 — where, last fall, it opened the Strangulation Clinic, which they say is in recognition of the serious health and safety consequences of the violent act.

The province told CBC News it’s unaware of other such clinics in B.C.

Typically overlooked, strangulation has become the focus of more study recently due to consequences like health issues and domestic homicides, experts say.

It’s the leading indicator of escalating violence in the future, according to Winston Sayson, a Crown prosecutor for 30 years who is now retired.

“When you reach that stage, you are in a very dangerous red zone,” he said, adding strangulation is now equivalent to assault with a weapon or assault causing bodily harm.

The most common victim-offender relationship involving homicide scene staging is an intimate partner relationship.

A woman is found dead, hanging by a ligature in her closet and discovered by her husband who appears heartbroken and grieving. You cut her down and confirm there is no pulse. By all accounts, the scene looks like a suicide. You call it as such and summon the coroner. Right?

Now consider that the husband (who found his wife hanging) had a documented history of domestic violence against his now-deceased wife. Would you ask more questions? Would you look for more witnesses or evidence of foul play? Would you secure the scene and call out investigators? Would you go so far as to suggest a possible homicide? Or is this going too far?

In their article, “The Perfect Murder: An Exploratory Study of Staged Murder Scenes and Concealed Femicide,” researchers Yifat Bitton and Hava Dayan take us through some of the variables that point to staged suicide scenes. [1] These variables, when present, give us reasonable cause to consider protecting scenes, like the one above, for a more thorough investigation. The authors provide interesting details about this topic:

• The most common victim-offender relationship involving homicide scene staging is an intimate partner relationship.
• The most staged homicide scenes involve the killing of an intimate partner.

In summarizing the data, Bitton and Dayan point to six predictive factors, that when present, suggest foul play:

• A premature death when the deceased was in apparent good health.
• Death by suicide.
• Evidence that one of the partners wished to terminate the relationship.
• Prior domestic violence on the part of the deceased’s partner.
• The deceased was found dead in her home.
• The deceased was found dead by her current or previous partner.

In her 2020 Psychology Today article, Joni E Johnston Psy.D., reminds us that when someone calls 911 and reports a suicide, “It’s easy to take that at face value. No matter how much an officer is trained to treat any sudden and unexpected death as a homicide until proven otherwise, we are all influenced by what we are first told about an event.

“When officers get to the scene, they not only find what initially looks like a genuine suicide, they have to deal with the seemingly shocked and devastated person who just discovered their loved one hanging on a rope or dead from a shotgun blast. It can be difficult – and seem unnecessarily harsh – to treat the situation as a crime scene and the loved one as a suspect. On top of this, if the person who finds the body is the actual killer (as often, although not always is the case), they have a great opportunity to plant additional seeds of a suicide in the officers’ minds.” [2]

Joni points to the 1985 strangulation death of Meg Purk, which was determined at the time to be a suicide. But in 2015, after the case was re-investigated, a jury convicted Meg’s husband of her murder. [3]

The Alliance for Hope International has been looking into these types of cases for years. They have a team of experts dedicated to re-investigating suspicious, domestic violence-related suicides. Most of these cases involve death by strangulation. Take, for example, the case of Stacy Feldman, which was featured on Dateline. [4] In March 2015, Stacy’s husband, Robert, called 911, reporting that he found Stacy unresponsive in the shower. She was pronounced dead at the scene. In June 2015, Robert was paid $750,000 from a life insurance policy on Stacy.

It wasn’t until 2017, when Dr. Bill Smock – part of the review team for the Alliance and an expert in strangulation – reviewed Stacy’s case and various photographs. He testified that Stacy died due to asphyxia and/or suffocation and that her injuries were the result of an assault including blunt force trauma, strangulation and suffocation. In April 2022, after deliberating for less than three hours, Robert was convicted of first-degree murder. You can be sure that the Alliance has many more examples.

In reviewing the literature, and as a result of their work in this area, the Alliance added four factors to the six listed above by Bitton and Dayan that can predict domestic violence-related staged suicide scenes:

• A prior history of domestic violence that includes strangulation/suffocation.
• The deceased’s partner was the last to see her/him alive.
• The surviving partner had control of the crime scene.
• The body had been moved or the scene/evidence had been altered in some way.

THE BOTTOM LINE

When responding to a suicide call for service, take the time to check for any history of domestic violence, and review the predictive factors above. To learn more, consider registering for training courses conducted by the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention.

When cases like this arise, take pause and consider protecting the scene and calling out investigators. Most importantly, stay safe out there.