‘What will be the legacy of so many women murdered?’
Experts call for urgent action to address ‘crisis’ after a year in which number of domestic homicides in the GTA spiked
At midnight on her birthday Natalie Lewandowski stared at her phone, waiting for a call that would never come.
Her 25-year-old sister, Alicia Lewandowski, had been killed two days earlier, on March 5, 2018 — one of14 women and children killed last year in the Greater Toronto Area in cases considered by police to be domestic homicides. Alicia’s boyfriend, Joseph Chang, has been charged with first-degree murder.
“We were best, best friends. We had a divine and unique bond. Everyone knew us as the ‘Lewandowski sisters,’ ” said Natalie, 32, on a December evening before her first Christmas since her sister’s death. “We would always s ay that when Mom and Dad go, we’d have each other.”
Photographs of her sister at various milestones are placed around her apartment. Alicia surrounded by friends on her birthday. Alicia at the surprise baby shower she threw when Lewandowski was pregnant with her son, Adrian. Alicia holding Adrian on the night he was born.
It’s the photographs of Alicia that will never be added to the framed collages that haunt Lewandowski. Not from her college graduation — Alicia was training to become an esthetician because she loved making people feel beautiful. Not from her wedding, or the birth of her first child.
When someone is murdered, their killer is “not just taking away a person’s life,” she said. “They are affecting everybody that loved the person and even generations later. My son is robbed of having an aunt and first cousins. I am robbed of ever being an aunt.”
There is little Lewandowski wants to say now about her sister’s case because she may be a witness in Chang’s as-yet-unscheduled criminal trial.
“(Alicia) gave people benefit of the doubt,” she said. “She loved spreading joy and bringing happiness to others.”
Lewandowski said her sister also went through abuse similar to what many women have gone through or are currently going through in their relationships.
“You don’t think it will ever happen,” she said of her sister’s murder.
The Greater Toronto Area saw more than twice as many domestic homicides in 2018 than in 2017 and three more than in each of 2014 and 2013.
Fourteen women and children were killed in the GTA last year in 11 cases where a current or former intimate partner was charged, according to a Star analysis.
The victims range in age from 13 to 76. But there are some commonalities: Most of the victims were found in their homes. In four cases, the apparent killer died by suicide after killing their current or former partner. In at least two cases, there was a known or documented history of abuse. In two cases, the victim was reportedly ending or had ended the relationship — a time known to be especially dangerous for women leaving abusive relationships.
It’s unclear why there was an increase in domestic homicides in the GTA in 2018, experts say. Both femicides — a term specifically referring to the killing of women and girls — and domestic homicides have, overall, been decreasing in Canada. Between 1975 and 2015, intimate partner homicide rates decreased 37 per cent for females and decreased by more than 69 per cent for males, according to the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability, which was launched in 2017.
However, homicide rates for Indigenous women have remained stable or increased over the same period. Indigenous women constituted a quarter of femicide victims in 2015 and the homicide rate for Indigenous women between 2001 and 2015 was nearly six times that of non-Indigenous women, according to Statistics Canada.
Women remain most at risk of being killed by a husband or boyfriend — 48 per cent of all solved femicides in Canada in 2015 were committed by a current or former intimate partner, according to the Femicide Observatory.
Women and girls are also far more likely than men and boys to be killed by someone they know well, including parents and other family members — only 6 per cent of female victims in 2015 were killed by a stranger and 14 per cent by a casual acquaintance. Meanwhile, 45 per cent of male victims were killed by a casual acquaintance, 16 per cent by a criminal acquaintance and 16 per cent by a stranger.
These patterns appear to be reflected in the femicide statistics in Peel Region, which saw nine femicides last year out of a total of 26 homicides. All but three allegedly involve an intimate partner.
In Toronto, which saw 96 homicides in Toronto in 2018, 21 victims were women and girls. Including two exceptional “mass casualty” incidents, the April van attack on Yonge St. and the Danforth mass shooting in July, more than half were allegedly murdered by strangers — a much higher number than is typical.
Examining all femicides is necessary to discover and prevent patterns of violence beyond intimate partner homicides, such as when women are killed by other family members including sons or grandsons, says Farrah Khan, the manager of the Ryerson University Office of Sexual Violence Support and Education.
The 2018 Femicide Census in the United Kingdom explores several femicide patterns, including terror attacks where women are killed or targeted, citing the attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in 2017. The report also notes a link between terrorists or mass shooters and a history of domestic violence and stresses the importance of examining factors that may make certain women more vulnerable, including race and immigration status.
Last year, the Liberal government proposed several new Criminal Code reforms targeting domestic violence, including increasing penalties for repeat offenders, making it more difficult for accused persons with previous domestic violence-related convictions to get bail on similar offences and explicitly allowing restitution to be ordered for a victim’s moving expenses, temporary housing, food, child care and transportation. The bill is currently before the Senate. The reforms also make strangulation a more serious offence, reflecting research that shows strangulation is not just extremely dangerous, but a risk factor for escalating violence — though University of Ottawa law professor Elizabeth Sheehy said this move may end up in- effective if accused persons can argue strangulation was consensual.
Sheehy said there remains a need for a federal strategy to tackle violence against women, which would allow for a more coherent approach across the country. “I think it’s very hard to imagine improvement that comes from haphazard law reform or fortunate decisions by one official in one jurisdiction or another,” she said.
Femicides — and violence against women — are not “women’s issues,” said Laura Hartley, the co-ordinator of Peel Committee Against Woman Abuse. “It’s a public issue, it’s a crisis and it requires a public response. It’s everyone in our communities’ responsibility to be working together to create a safe and just society for all women.”
Every year, the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses compiles a list of the women killed in the province and vigils are held on Dec. 6, the anniversary of the killing of 14 women at the École Polytechnique de Montréal.
Khan says the significance of the list is made even more stark because so many could have been prevented.
“What will be the legacy of so many women murdered?” Khan said.
Natalie Lewandowski wants to see more education for both young men and women about what healthy and abusive relationships look like, what to do if they are in abusive relationships and what resources, such as free counselling or safe places to stay, they can access.
“If you see red flags, run as fast as you can because you may think things will change and get better, but they don’t,” she said.
She and her family remain devastated by Alicia’s death.
“I am not the same person that I was,” she said.
Lewandowski used to be a funeral director. She spent her days helping families endure the loss of loved ones with compassion and dignity. When it came time for her sister’s funeral, she did Alicia’s makeup herself, so that her winged eyeliner would be just right.
“I wanted her to look like Alicia,” she said.
She can no longer work in the funeral industry — it’s too hard, even though she understands the pain of losing a loved one more acutely than ever before.
It would have been Alicia’s 26th birthday on Dec. 8. Lewandowski stared at the clock until it struck midnight. “I had my phone in my hands and I wanted so badly to call her and sing happy birthday to her. And I couldn’t make that call. And I will never be able to make that call.”
Note: Annual domestic homicide figures were compiled using police news releases, news reports, the Star’s homicide database, and the femicide lists compiled by the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses and the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability. Some victims may have been excluded due to lack of available information.