Murders underscore domestic abuse crisis
JoAnne Brooks gave an ominous presentation to the premier’s Roundtable on Violence Against Women last week.
She described to the packed room the particular vulnerabilities of women in rural areas such as Renfrew County, where she runs the sexual assault centre. Her presentation could be summed up with three words: isolation, poverty and guns.
Renfrew County is the stretch of forest between Ottawa and Algonquin Park. Call the police in some places, and if you get cell reception it can take them an hour to arrive, says Brooks, who also co-chairs the local committee fighting violence against women. Women here are poor — the median income is less than $25,000 — and many don’t think they can afford to leave their abusive partners. This is deer-hunting territory. “There are guns in many cabinets in Renfrew County,” Brooks tells me over the phone. “Many women get their safety plan in place before hunting season.”
The morning after giving her PowerPoint presentation, Brooks was back in her office in Pembroke when the phone rang warning her staff to get to safety. Three Renfrew women had been murdered in their homes that morning. All three were past partners of Basil Borutski, the man police tracked down in the woods and later charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
Two of the women, Anastasia Kuzyk and Nathalie Warmerdam, were shot dead. The third woman, Carol Culleton, was strangled, news reports said.
The broader facts of the case are terrifyingly common. A woman is killed by her partner in Canada every six days. Journalist Brian Vallée compared this death count to that of fallen Canadian soldiers and police officers over seven years, and found that five times as many civilian women were killed by their male partners compared to those in combat or carrying a badge. His book on the subject was called The War on Women.
These aren’t just isolated incidents of terror. They are part of a menacing pattern.
Since that afternoon, Brooks and her colleagues have been in emergency mode, answering distress calls, attending wakes, hosting vigils and marches.
“People are looking for answers and women are afraid. Women’s reality became very real: this does happen, it happens to women we know and we are sort of one bad date away,” says Bev Ritza, support service co-ordinator at the Women’s Sexual Assault Centre of Renfrew County. “They all did everything women are supposed to do. The problem is, men were not doing what they were supposed to do.”
By that she meant this: at least two of the women had called police and pressed charges against Borutski for threats and attacks. The women left him. Warmerdam, a hospice nurse, wore a domestic abuse survivors’ panic button to signal police if she ever saw her ex-partner in town, her son told the Ottawa Citizen.
Borutski had a long rap sheet of criminal charges and convictions, many in relation to women. In 2014, he was convicted of theft, a firearms offence and assault for attempting to choke Kuzyk, the 36-year-old real estate agent he had dated.
These women were model survivors, and he was a known violent attacker.
If our system cannot protect women, then it is clearly very broken.
So the question becomes, what do we need to change?
It’s obviously too early to tell. We’ll likely have to wait for the trial, the coroner’s report and an inquest, if one is called. But the tragedies call for soul-searching, particularly during an election campaign.
Feminist lawyer Pamela Cross says the parole system should be changed to automatically alert not just victims, but past partners of abusers once they are released from jail. That seems like a no-brainer.
Domestic Violence Death Review Committee member Peter Jaffe points to a recent study on increased outreach to abusers once they leave jail, so they are less likely to reoffend. That sounds promising, too.
And at the all-candidates debate in Renfrew County this week, NDP candidate Dan McCarthy said his party will launch a national action plan to address violence against women. Hear, hear!
The Conservative incumbent for Renfrew-Nippissing-Pembroke, Cheryl Gallant, said she wanted to call a roundtable of local women’s groups to “put forward specific recommendations we can act upon.” We can only assume that if one of those recommendations included gun control, there would be no action.
Gallant was the MP who pushed to destroy the country’s long-gun registry, to the dismay of haunted
“This does happen, it happens to women we know and we are sort of one bad date away.” BEV RITZA CO-ORDINATOR, WOMEN’S SEXUAL ASSAULT CENTRE OF RENFREW COUNTY
women and domestic assault experts.
That registry was the legacy of the Montreal Massacre, when 14 young women were gunned down at the École Polytechnique in 1989.
“This is our Montreal Massacre,” says Brooks.
After we spoke she was heading off to a candlelight vigil at the Renfrew County Women’s Monument in Petawawa. The monument, unveiled two years ago, is a memorial to local women who were killed by their partners. The names of 16 are engraved on a large stone. Nearby, there is an eight-foot metal sculpture depicting the forms of three female bodies — as if predicting this tragedy.