Domestic violence awareness promoted

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/11/2010 (5646 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Pamela Creighton and her father Edward relived the horror of June 20, 2002 on Monday, but in a good way.

Together they placed a life-sized wooden silhouette of her Pamela’s sister, Jennifer Creighton, on the marble floor of the legislative building’s rotunda on the first day of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Jennifer Creighton was stabbed to death by her boyfriend in her Burrows Avenue bedroom more than eight years ago. Her killing haunts her family each day, a voice and smile they miss deeply. “It’s a loss of someone you can’t talk to anymore,” Edward said.

Now they want to turn that sorrow into something more productive, the constant gnawing into something that helps women get out of abusive relationships before they turn deadly.

“She was always the peacemaker and saw the good in everyone,” Pamela said of her older sister. Creighton’s silhouette joins 16 other wood silhouettes, each one representing a woman killed by a spouse, as part of the Silent Witness project. It’s a travelling exhibit now on display at the Legislative Building. The silhouettes show the name of each victim. A single unnamed figure represents women still experiencing domestic abuse and women whose murders remain unsolved.

The province also announced its six-point plan to increase awareness of domestic violence and what people can do to get out of violent homes. It includes:

— Cyberstalking awareness strategy that targets a younger audience and speaks to how domestic violence escalates. The campaign will be delivered to all 470 high schools in the province.

— A new domestic-violence prevention website aimed at wide audience. It has information for youth, seniors, Aboriginal people, people in same-sex relationships, men, women and new Manitobans as well as safety tips to deal with technology and cyberstalking.

The province also said information about domestic violence has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Tagalog, Cree, German, Ojibwa, Punjabi and Spanish and the Stalking is a Crime brochure has been updated to integrate materials on cyberstalking and related topics.

The Creightons say the more people know about domestic abuse, how it can escalate to unspeakable violence, the better.

“We what people to realize they’ve got to reach out and trust their family to say that they’re having a problem with their marriage or boyfriend, and to realize that they can come home,” Edward said. Leslie Adam Henry was convicted of second-degree murder in Jennifer’s death and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

He will be released in March as by then he’ll have served two-thirds of his sentence.

bruce.owen@freepress.mb.ca