On prison, redux

Surprise surprise, Darcie Clarke moved to quiet Merritt, BC specifically to get away from the man who is suspected of killing her three children. Surprise surprise, she didn’t think leaving was enough, so she had a peace bond between them. And surprise surprise Allan Shoenborn violated it. And paid a whole $200 in fines! And the next time he was in jail, they let him out on bail because the court neglected to take note of all of these screeching sirens and neon flashing red flags! They forgot about how he’s a drunken wife abuser!

I kind of wish my tax dollars could stop going to inquiry after analysis after assessment all proving once again that the most dangerous thing a woman can do in a violent intimate partnership is leave the man. Actually I don’t know what is more depressing, that we keep finding the same thing and are seemingly powerless to change the dependent variable, or what this damn dependent variable turns out to be. I actually was commissioned in ’06 to do one of these reviews, reporting on years of domestic homicides and suicides in New Brunswick from the bowels of our province’s coroner’s office. I found what everyone finds: combine separation, alcohol, mental illness, a history of violence, useless peace bonds, and someone ends up dead. If there are children, it’s often the children.

BC has a Child Death Review Unit., and particularly in high-population jurisdictions like BC, these coroner outfits are valuable for tracking trends in accidental deaths (the BC CDRU’s latest report is on unsafe infant sleep practices). It can also trace how fatal child abuse might be found at the intersection of miscommunicating health, community, and education services. (NB, too, has a child death review board). But the Shoenborn children’s deaths are not about their being children, vulnerable to accidents and the excessive force of unfit parents. (Not that I am saying Mr Shoenborn was a fit parent; he clearly was not). The Shoenborn children died because the father was out to injure their mother.

You leave me, I’ll leave you with nothing.

The frequency of child death involvement in domestic disputes and the articulation of separations is disgustingly high. In the NB review I completed, almost as many children died as women. And more men died than women, because of so-called “love triangle” killings of women’s new partners, suicides, and murders of sons. The separation of Child Death Review and Intimate femicide-focused domestic violence death review hides the deadly extent of intimate partner violence, and also frankly results in double counting.

More to the point, all this counting doesn’t seem to be stopping anything. One would think that if decades of research in this area showed the stark clarity of the explanatory factors listed above, it would be pretty immediate- banally status-quo- to check if a separated man was an abuser, an alcoholic, mentally ill, and had a peace bond against him before releasing him from prison. Have these facts all stapled together in a file, and make a sensible call to keep him a spell. In my secondary research, I read that men who have a history of incarceration for domestic violence are less likely to reoffend lethally. Initially I was surprised- obviously these men are violent, and violence escalates, that’s the thing about violence. But in prison, the men sobered up. They got psychiatric help. Frankly, they learned that their pathetic behaviour made them each an excuse for a man. So they changed.