Action is needed on domestic violence, not more reports

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/02/2024 (596 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There has been a great deal of attention paid (and rightly so) to the domestic violence homicides in Carman earlier this month that claimed five lives. While there were the standard offerings of counselling and condolences for the families and friends of the victims, it all feels a bit too much like the standard “thoughts and prayers.”

It’s time to do more than that. Address this issue with more funding, a change in police responses and more resources and stop using it as a photo op.

Manitoba and Saskatchewan have the highest rate of domestic violence in Canada. According to Statistics Canada: “In 2022, Saskatchewan (730 victims per 100,000 population) and Manitoba (585) had the highest provincial rates of police-reported family violence and intimate partner violence (732 for Saskatchewan and 633 for Manitoba).” Additionally, in Winnipeg, domestic violence calls are one of the top calls to 911, especially on a weekend.

There were so many red flags in this case. According to Juliette Hastings, the mother of 17-year-old Myah-Lee Gratton, one of the five victims, Winnipeg Child and Family Services were told she may not be safe in that home. Hastings told local media that she had raised her concerns about the placement last year, but nothing was done.

Gratton lived with a woman she considered her aunt, 30-year-old Amanda Clearwater and Amanda’s children — six-year-old Bethany, four-year-old Jayven, and two-and-a-half-month-old Isabella, all of whom died. Clearwater’s domestic partner, 29-year-old Ryan Howard Manoakeesick, has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder in their deaths.

Manoakeesick has a history with the criminal system. He was a known user of methamphetamine — and according to Global News, was warned by a judge “he needed help with his addiction before things ‘completely spiral out of control.’”

How CFS could consider this to be an acceptable placement for a 17-year-old is mystifying, but if recommendations from the Manitoba Advocate for Children and Youth had been implemented, this may not have happened.

The advocate’s office released a report to the Conservatives in 2022 that found a child in Manitoba is exposed to intimate partner violence every two hours. The report made seven recommendations, including education in schools and increased funding for family violence shelters.

More importantly, the office also urged the government to look at the policing standards in regard to investigating intimate partner violence. This includes reporting IPV to CFS if children are involved.

According to the report, not all police departments take children out of a home if domestic violence is involved. In a followup, the advocate’s office reported that none of those recommendations has been implemented thus far.

As well, both Gratton and six-year-old Brittany were students in Carman’s school system. Children experiencing domestic violence in their homes show signs of that trauma in school.

Educators need to become more intuitive about recognizing those signs of violence to protect them. This includes truancy, self-harm, lack of self-esteem and flinching. Because of colonial violence, Indigenous children are more likely to be exposed to domestic violence. Educators need to be culturally aware of this.

Teachers can be the front line in addressing and recognizing intimate partner violence. They need to be supported in addressing this issue.

Police departments need to actually address domestic violence as domestic violence. The RCMP refused to describe the incident in Carman as domestic violence, instead calling it a murder investigation. Obviously, it’s both. But not naming it for what it is, along with all the gendered aspects of it (most domestic violence incidents involve women) is a continuation of shaming. If police don’t recognize it as a crime to the media, why would a victim report it?

It’s also time to start taking the plethora of reports written about domestic violence seriously. Child and Family Services Minister Nahanni Fontaine said following the incident in Carman that there is no easy answer to domestic violence. But when she was a special adviser on aboriginal women’s issues with the Manitoba government back in 2014, she felt optimistic that things were going to improve with more education. Ten years later, improvement hasn’t happened.

Make this a priority.

Premier Wab Kinew has said that he’s open to an inquest or inquiry into what happened with CFS in the wake of what happened in Carman. But why bother?

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Eleven years after the Phoenix Sinclair inquiry, the province has done little to clean up a broken system that allowed children to fall through the cracks. And the Mass Casualty Commission held an inquiry that has outlined how poorly the RCMP handled domestic violence incidents in rural communities in Nova Scotia following a mass shooting that killed 22.

So far, the RCMP has failed to submit a plan on how it will respond to the scathing report.

Another inquest or inquiry won’t do much to build confidence that anything will change.

Enough thoughts and prayers and earnest photo ops. There’s enough information for the province to implement recommendations now that will save lives.

Shannon Sampert is a lecturer at RRC Polytech and an instructor at the University of Manitoba. She was the politics and perspectives editor at the Free Press from 2014-17.