Renfrew County is Ontario’s biggest county; it covers more than 7,000 square kilometres. Spread over that distance are 106,000 people, which is about fourteen people per square kilometre. To fully appreciate how sparse the population is, compare those numbers to the city of Toronto, where over 3 million people live in a space of just 630 square kilometres. That’s 4,750 per square kilometre.
One of Canada’s largest military bases—Garrison Petawawa, with 6,100 members of the military—is located in Renfrew County. Deep River and Chalk River are home to Canadian Nuclear Laboratories. Agriculture and tourism feature prominently in the county’s economy. Like many rural parts of Canada, Renfrew County is conservative; both large and small c style. Conservative party candidates are often successful at the polls. Support for the Freedom Convoy is visible, especially in the countryside. It can be a hard place to be an outspoken woman.
There is just one women’s shelter in this vast area, meaning that it might take a woman an hour or more to get there. That assumes she has access to a vehicle, because there’s no public transportation system. There aren’t a lot of family law practitioners, almost none outside the urban areas. Cell service is intermittent. There are just four Ontario Provincial Police detachments to monitor the county, so police response times can be long. One thing there are plenty of is guns, mostly long guns of one kind or another. While they usually have a legitimate purpose, those firearms are also used by abusers to threaten and terrify their partners and, sometimes, to kill them.
September 22, 2015, was an unusually warm day in Renfrew County. People went about their business, which for the staff and volunteers at the Women’s Sexual Assault Centre meant putting the finishing touches on that evening’s annual Take Back the Night March. Those plans were rapidly shelved, though, when word trickled out that women in the county were being killed.
By late morning, police had been called to three crime scenes. First, in Wilno, they found Anastasia Kuzyk, a well-known and well-liked real estate agent and bartender at the Wilno Tavern, shot to death in her home. Then, just a short drive away, they found Nathalie Warmerdam, a much-beloved palliative care nurse, also shot to death in her home. Her teenaged son was hiding in the woods outside the house, having followed his mother’s instructions to run when the killer entered the house. Last, they were called to a cottage by a real estate agent who, when she arrived to discuss listing the cottage for sale, had found its owner, Carol Culleton, a recently retired civil servant from Ottawa, strangled to death.
Later that day, police arrested a man and charged him with all three murders. He had had personal relationships with the three women, two of whom had turned to the police and other services for help because of his violence. He had a long history of abusive behaviour toward his partners but had faced criminal consequences only in the years immediately preceding the murders. After being found guilty on two occasions and serving short jail sentences, he was released on probation, even though, both times, he had refused to sign his terms of release. He had faced no consequences when he’d failed to follow those conditions—in particular, by not going to the Partner Assault Response sessions he had been ordered to attend.
At trial, held in Ottawa in the fall of 2017, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder in the killings of Kuzyk and Warmerdam and of second-degree murder in the killing of Culleton. And on December 6, 2017—the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre—he was sentenced to three life sentences.
While the sentence was such that the families of the murdered women and the community in which the killings took place knew they didn’t need to worry about the perpetrator being released from prison, the criminal process—by definition—left a lot of unanswered questions. Criminal trials do not look at broader issues: the root causes of the perpetrator’s behaviour, the social context, the history surrounding the events, or systemic failures that contributed to what happened. For that, we must turn to other processes. In the Renfrew County case, those processes would include an inquest. In August 2019, the coroner announced an inquest—which came to be called the CKW Inquest and which I was closely involved in—into the triple femicide. That inquest took place in June 2022, almost seven years after the women’s murders. Prior to CKW, Ontario had held two inquests into domestic violence homicides and three others that also dealt with domestic violence–related deaths.
The CKW Inquest created a space for survivors and others to share their stories, allowed for an expansive analysis of the issues that would never have happened in a criminal or family court trial, brought the story of intimate partner abuse in rural communities to the attention of largely urban decision and policy makers, increased public awareness about intimate partner violence and rural realities, and inspired people to call for systemic change.
At the same time, inquests and inquiries on their own are not enough. Their reports and recommendations do not have legally binding authority, so they can be—and are—ignored. Governments with the power to implement their recommendations often do so, if at all, in a piecemeal manner that does not provide the system-wide change needed or that can sometimes make matters worse.
In the months since the inquest ended, more women in Renfrew County and across Ontario have been killed by their partners or former partners. Between November 26, 2022, and November 25, 2023, according to the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses, sixty-two women were killed in Ontario in acts of femicide: nineteen women were killed by a partner or former partner, seven by an adult son, one by her grandson, and three by other male family members. In thirteen cases, the relationship between the killer and victim was unknown. In that same period of time, in two separate incidents, four children were killed by their fathers in the context of intimate partner violence.
Intimate partner violence is clearly an epidemic. Women and children continue to die; thousands more flee their homes only to face poverty and a lack of affordable housing. Legal systems and the players in those systems that should protect survivors still don’t properly understand the prevalence and complexity of violence in families.
I can’t tell you how many of my clients have scuttled almost sideways into my office, so intimidated were they at the thought of engaging with a lawyer, let alone the law. For this reason, I did not hang my law school graduation or law society membership certificates on my office wall, and I kept most of my legal tomes out of sight, cluttering up my bookshelves with novels, cookbooks, games, and knick-knacks instead. I may not have thought of myself as an intimidating force, but to many of the women I represented, I was, because I was a gatekeeper to the law.
Folks who have never had a legal issue that needed to be resolved are unconcerned by the complex world of the law: the different sets of rules that govern our behaviour in one arena or another; the procedures that have been developed to make it easier to apply the rules; the intersections, overlaps, and conflicts between and among the various laws. A woman with kids who has just left an abusive partner doesn’t care, for instance, that in Ontario there are multiple laws at both the provincial and federal levels that play a role in cases of intimate partner violence. There are a few different family laws, along with criminal and child protection laws, provincial offence statutes, and, depending on the circumstances, immigration and refugee laws and laws governing Indigenous people. That woman just wants me to use the law so that her kids can keep living with her.
There’s a tendency in Western democracies to see criminal law as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. Wrong behaviour is determined by the offences detailed in the Criminal Code. People who do those things should be punished for having done them. The law ensures that those of us who don’t do bad things are protected from those who do.
Of course, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Lots of wrong acts are not deemed illegal. Some activities that are illegal probably shouldn’t be. The application of the law by the police, and its interpretation by lawyers and judges, is sullied by systemic racism, misogyny, the impacts of historic and ongoing genocide of Indigenous people, classism, ableism, and more. Access to justice is affected by the social location and circumstances of both the survivor and the accused. All of this plays itself out in the context of gender-based violence, including both intimate partner and sexual violence.
With respect to sexual violence, the Criminal Code lists several offences that are meant to respond to different kinds of circumstances: the acts in which the accused has engaged, the age of the survivor, the relationship between the survivor and the accused, the capacity of the survivor, and so on. But in many situations, making the criminal response to sexual violence work for either the survivor or the accused still feels like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. As a result, sexual assault has a very low reporting rate.
Holly Johnson, a well-respected researcher on topics related to intimate partner and sexual violence, has examined trends in police and court processing of sexual assaults. Drawing on data produced by the Statistics Canada crime victimization survey, she notes that 460,000 women in Canada were victims of sexual assault in 2004. She then analyzes what happened to each of those assaults in terms of a criminal law response. Her work makes chilling reading. To render her findings more manageable for the public, YWCA Canada took the data and created a powerful infographic showing that, out of every 1,000 sexual assaults, thirty-three are reported to police, twenty-nine are registered as a crime, twelve have charges laid, six are prosecuted, and three lead to a conviction. This isn’t good for anyone: the survivor, the person who engaged in the sexual violence, or the rest of us.
Intimate partner violence is also difficult to fit within the criminal law framework. There are a number of charges that can be laid when one partner abuses the other: assault, aggravated assault, assault causing bodily harm, forcible confinement, abduction, uttering threats, criminal harassment, and, of course, homicide (first- and second-degree murder and manslaughter), to name just a few. But even this array of charges covers only a small portion of the kinds of abuse to which a woman may be subjected by her intimate partner. And as with sexual violence, most women don’t want to report intimate partner violence to the police. When they do, they lose control of their situation, because, in Canada, police are required to lay charges in all domestic violence cases where they believe there is a reasonable likelihood of obtaining a conviction.
Reporting to the police, even when dealing with a compassionate, well-informed officer, is not pleasant. It’s less accessible to some women than others because of their class, race, or, perhaps, past history with the police. Making a report of intimate partner violence to the police means that, if the woman has children, the child protection authority will be called in.
The criminal process for both sexual and intimate partner violence cases is a long one, during most of which the woman will not know what is going on. Her role is that of a witness to her own abuse—with her body, possibly, functioning as evidence. Because she is not a party to the proceedings, she is not privy to much of what is going on and has no voice or power in most of it. While the case is underway, the accused is likely living in the community under restrictions set out in bail conditions. This time—which could last for months or even longer—is challenging for a survivor of intimate partner violence.
If she didn’t want her partner charged, she may not be concerned if he breaches the bail condition prohibiting contact with her. Perhaps she needs him to come to the house to take care of the kids while she goes to work. Perhaps she and the kids miss him and just want to see him. This can be problematic for her later, because her partner’s lawyer is likely to raise this contact when he cross-examines her to cast doubt on her evidence of the abuse or her fear of him.
If, on the other hand, she did want her partner charged, the bail period is challenging in different ways. He may attempt to intimidate her into letting him see her or come into their home. He may try to bargain with her, promising to do something she wants in exchange for her agreeing to get the bail conditions or even the charges dropped. Of course, once he has what he wants, he’s unlikely to follow through on his part of the promise. In both situations, she is at risk of further violence.
The case may settle without her being asked how she feels about that. If it doesn’t, she will have to speak in an open courtroom about very personal matters and be cross-examined by the abuser’s lawyer or, if he doesn’t have one, maybe by the abuser himself. She does not get to have a lawyer of her own. In Canada, someone accused of a crime is presumed innocent until the Crown proves them to be guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” This is a very high burden of proof: the judge or jury must believe, with almost absolute certainty, that the person did what they have been charged with.
This is good—we don’t want people being found guilty because the judge or jury thought there was a possibility they did whatever they were charged with or just because they didn’t like the look of them. However, in gender-based violence cases, this standard of proof is especially difficult to meet because of the nature of the offence. Most gender-based violence takes place in private. Often, particularly in cases of intimate partner violence, it goes on over a long period of time. There may be no physical evidence and no corroboration, and while neither of these is required for a guilty finding, their absence may be misinterpreted to mean the survivor’s story is not credible.
And then what? Suppose the accused in an intimate partner violence case is found guilty. He may or may not go to jail. If he doesn’t go to jail, he may have probation conditions that prohibit his contact with the survivor and require him to do, or forbid him from doing, certain things. While jail for the accused can provide the survivor with a limited period of time when she is protected from his physical violence, it’s not generally helpful for either person in the long run.
Some of the things we learned from the CKW Inquest: good programming for intimate partner violence offenders in custody is thin on the ground; what’s available once an offender is released is also limited; and the supervision of offenders on probation is poor, with little apparent accountability for either the offender or the probation officer when conditions are breached. Suppose the accused is found not guilty. The message it sends is either that the woman was not telling the truth or that intimate partner violence is not taken seriously. Will that woman report the next assault or threat by her partner to the police? Probably not, even if her safety or that of the children is at serious risk.
In other words, criminal law is, in many ways, ill-suited as a response to intimate partner violence. One reason is that criminal law is single incident focused while the real harm of intimate partner violence is felt through a pattern of behaviours and incidents over time. When a criminal case is based on one charge that reflects one incident out of months or years of abuse, there is often no way to present the evidence needed to establish the impact of the accused’s behaviours.
Where and how do we begin to think about how to fix this? One possible way could be improving the responses to intimate partner violence after it happens: increasing services and supports for survivors, ensuring adequate programming for those who have caused the harm, writing new laws and improving those that already exist, maybe even creating new systems outside of those we have now.
Another could be preventing intimate partner violence from happening in the first place. To move toward this goal, we need to acknowledge the complex roles of entrenched systems that allow poverty, racism, and misogyny to flourish. Those are big systems to change, and the work can feel overwhelming, so we need to break that work into manageable pieces by taking on specific initiatives: supporting campaigns to bring in a basic income program; working with our municipalities to create community safety and well-being plans; educating colleagues, friends, and family members about intimate partner violence using programs like the Neighbours, Friends, and Families initiative in Ontario.
The truth is that we can’t take an either/or approach. We need to do both: improve our responses to intimate partner violence as we work to prevent it from happening altogether. To be successful, we need a heretofore unseen public and political commitment to improving responses to intimate partner violence and preventing it from happening. We also need to think creatively and consider brand-new ideas as well as those that have been tossed aside in the past as being too radical or too expensive.
We may be a small word, but in this case, it describes a very large assortment of people. Subject matter experts, of course, including not just academic and professional ones but also those who are experts by virtue of their lived experience: survivors, family members of victims who did not survive, and front-line workers. Everyone whose job brings them in contact with anyone affected by intimate partner violence: social workers, administrators of government programs like social assistance and housing, child care workers, teachers, health care providers and institutions, police, probation and parole officers, psychologists, lawyers, judges, prosecutors, those working in the carceral system. People with cultural expertise, whether professional or through lived experience; disabled folks and those who work with them; newcomers to Canada and the professionals who provide them with services and supports. Rates of gender-based violence, including intimate partner violence, in Indigenous communities show the impact of the history of genocide, the theft of land and children, the residential schools system and the Sixties Scoop, the eradication of Indigenous languages and cultures, and ongoing racism leading to a disproportionate rate of criminalization of Indigenous people as well as poverty.
Non-Indigenous Canadians must find ways to work with and beside Indigenous communities, turning for leadership to those who know about the realities of intimate partner violence in Indigenous communities and the role of colonization and genocide, rather than thinking we know what needs to be done. This work needs to ensure we bring a distinctions-based approach, understanding the unique cultures and needs of different Indigenous communities. We already have tools we should be turning to for guidance. The Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission provide one pathway; the Calls to Justice of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women provide another.
We must also ensure that members of 2SLGBTQI+ communities are part of the discussion, as well as both young and old people, poverty experts, and those with lived experiences of poverty. We need to invite people with political power and others in decision-making roles as well as key decision makers in the private sector, and we need to talk with people in other countries who have already figured some of this out. Neighbours, friends, and family need to be involved, which brings pretty much everyone into the discussion, because—whether we know it or not—all of us have some kind of connection with at least one person who is being abused and one who is causing that harm. Finally and critically, we need to include those who cause the harm, because we have much to learn from them.
Adapted and excerpted from And Sometimes They Kill You: Confronting the Epidemic of Intimate Partner Violence by Pamela Cross (2024), with permission of Between the Lines.
