Our ugly truth: Three women killed in the fortnight following lockdown
Angela Smith’s body was found at the neighbouring flat the night New Zealand was allowed to have parties again. It was a Wednesday, May 13, and the beginning of lockdown level 2. After almost two months of isolation, rules now permitted social gatherings of up to 10, and people across the country were taking advantage of their freedom.
Angela, 49, didn’t like parties. She drank every Wednesday when her benefit came in, but she mostly drank alone. She certainly didn’t like to drink at Unit 7, where she was stabbed to death sometime between 10pm and when police arrived at 1.30am on Thursday.
“That’s why I find it weird,” says Angela’s friend, Carol Horne, who lives in the same row of squat block units in the West Auckland suburb of Henderson, where Angela moved in with her 12-yearold son a few years earlier. “She wouldn’t go down there because there were always just men drinking inside. Maybe she would go and just have one sip and then come back, she wouldn’t stay.”
Horne says the occupant of Unit 7, a blind beneficiary, was wellknown for having noisy gatherings at his home. Police had been called before, she said, and complaints were made to Ka¯ inga Ora (formerly Housing New Zealand) by the other residents.
The night Angela died, Horne said, the blind man had knocked on her door first. “He wanted a cigarette. When I didn’t have one, he went to Angela’s to see her.” The next Horne heard was from another neighbour, saying something terrible had happened.
Angela Joy Smith was the second of three women killed in New Zealand in the weeks after our harshest level of lockdown lifted. Tania Maree Hadley, 47, was stabbed then set alight at her home in Mt Roskill, Auckland. Shirley Alaina Reedy, 52, was found dead in a motel room in Te Anau, at 6.30 in the evening. In each case, homicide charges have been laid by police.
Overseas, such deaths have been termed “coronavirus murders”, the inevitable result of escalating male violence during a time of extreme tension.
Domestic assault has ballooned worldwide during the pandemic, including in New Zealand, where police reported an initial 20 per cent increase in calls.
During lockdown, extra funding was provided to help services reach at-risk families, and public messaging ramped up to ensure victims knew they could still ask for help, and that it would come. They knew that women trapped alone with abusers could be a recipe for disaster.
Despite that, experts reject the idea these three deaths were caused by the pandemic.
In fact, they fear that, in a country with a mental health crisis, severe addiction issues, and a horrific record of violence against women, shifting the blame will only further serve to cloud our ugly, complex truth.
“Whether it was right now or in a few months’ time or years’ time those women — or women like them — were likely to have met untimely deaths because they lived difficult, complicated lives,” says National Network of Family
Violence Services chief executive Merran Lawler.
“And unless there are clearer avenues to get to safety or create safe spaces in their lives then their fragility and marginality remains. All Covid19 did was exacerbate that marginality. It didn’t create it, it amplified it.”
Data shows in the 2019 year, 27 women were killed in New
Zealand. Almost half of those were killed by a partner or an ex, making it the worst year for intimate partner violence since 2009.
The most recent Family
Violence Death Review Committee report, which looked at the lives of 97 violent men, found the most common feature of those who went on to kill was a violent childhood. Trauma also had an impact on girls, who grew up believing that women were to blame for the violence experienced, and so the pattern continued.
“That’s the sort of stuff we see every single day, not just the trauma inherent in the experience of family violence but the ongoing trauma from historical violence,” Lawler says.
As lockdown wanes, those working in the family violence sector are both hopeful that some of the pressure will ease, but worried that the focus will once again shift away from violence against women.
“We’ve had great media attention about domestic violence during Covid-19 but it was really bad before Covid,” said Holly Carrington, of domestic violence charity Shine. “Covid only made situations more complex.”
She said it was frustrating that while there was precedent for events like Covid to exacerbate domestic violence, there had been no planning for such an event.
“For example, the Christchurch earthquakes had a huge impact on domestic violence. It was similar to Covid in that services had to shut down, police were stretched, and referrals were going up,” she said. “We need to put some thought into that ... We need to be better prepared.”
Ang Jury, chief executive of Women’s Refuge, said the deaths were a sobering reminder of what troubled people went through all the time in our country, not just because there had been a crisis.
“These are three ugly incidents of very vulnerable people being hurt by vulnerable people,” she said. “And that’s stuff that’s always been in the too-hard basket, too expensive. What do we do with people who won’t accept help or can’t? We talk about choice but choice is relative. If every choice in front of you is bad it’s hard to work out which one to make.”
But she doubted the stories of Angela, and Tania, and Shirley would be remembered, sad as they were.
“They’re not young, they’re not beautiful, they’re not healthy and tragic. They’re not Grace Millane, they’re far from it. They’re the kind of stories we forget all the time.”
"They’re not young, they’re not beautiful, they’re not healthy and tragic. They’re the kind of stories we forget all the time."