America’s Deadly Epidemic: Violence Against Women | Mighty 790 KFGO
By Magali Druscovich and Maria Caspani
NEW YORK (Reuters) – In Tammy Suomen’s living room in Duluth, Minnesota, there are memories of her daughter Jackie Defoe and grandson Kevin Shabaiash Jr. Teddy bears line the couch. Pictures of her smiling loved ones cover the coffee table and kitchen island.
Defoe was 13 weeks pregnant when she and 21-month-old Kevin were beaten and stabbed to death in March 2020 at their home on the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation near Duluth.
In May, a jury convicted Defoe’s boyfriend, Sheldon Thompson, of first-degree murder in the deaths of Defoe, her unborn child and Kevin. He was sentenced to three consecutive life terms with no chance of parole for the Defoe and Kevin murders. Attempts to reach Thompson through his attorney were unsuccessful.
The murders illustrate America’s ongoing crisis. According to the national think tank Violence Policy Center (VPC), in 2019, nine out of ten murdered women were killed by men they knew. In almost two-thirds of the cases, the women were the men’s wives or other intimate partners.
Often such killings are the result of years of abuse, which six experts interviewed by Reuters said raise questions about how police, courts and society in general support women.
In such crimes, the attacker and the target know each other intimately and may share children and a home and finances, making the challenge complex.
“It’s cultural. It’s religious. It’s psychological. It’s many layers,” said Detective Riasharo Garcenila, who helps coordinate the Los Angeles Police Department’s domestic violence unit. “It’s so hard to have one answer to a crime that’s multi-layered.”
The statistics are particularly grim in communities of color. In Minnesota, 9% of all girls and women murdered between 2010 and 2019, like Defoe, were American Indian, even though they make up only 1% of the state’s population. the state legislature reports to lawmakers on efforts to document, understand, and reduce violence.
In 2019, black women and girls were murdered at more than twice the rate of white women and girls, according to the Washington-based VPC, which bases its numbers on FBI data.
NEW OTHERS OF THE COVENANTS
US President Joe Biden signed a spending bill earlier this year that included additional funding for housing, legal and other support for victims of domestic violence. In June, he signed a gun reform bill aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of those convicted of domestic violence.
Three decades have passed since Nicole Sharpe’s father shot her mother in their Brooklyn apartment. Sharpe’s father, who died in 2012, was convicted of manslaughter in 1993 and sentenced to 16 years.
“I don’t think in people’s minds that domestic violence has really changed too much” since her mother’s death, said Sharpe, 46. “People still tend to blame the victim.”
Melanie Fields of the National Association of Prosecuting Attorneys’ Domestic Violence Committee, based in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said she has seen some attitudes change in the 13 years since she helped start its domestic violence unit.
“When I started this, they (women) were not believed or rejected by law enforcement and even the community,” Fields said. “In general, the situation in our country has improved significantly.”
He said officers in his jurisdiction, for example, have learned that medical evidence shows that repeated beatings and choking can make victims sound incoherent.
One ongoing challenge for researchers is determining the extent of the problem. Data sets like the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports can be useful, but they leave gaps that are difficult to fill in tracking gender-based homicides, said Associate Professor Alison Marganski, director of criminology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse.
The picture is a muddled fear that recent pandemic shutdowns exacerbated domestic violence. James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University, analyzed FBI data and found that domestic homicides increased 26 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year.
But a paper published in January by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, which examined data from 17 major urban police departments, found no statistically significant difference in the rate of intimate partner homicides before and during the pandemic.
Detective Marie Sadanaga, a colleague of Garcenila’s, said legal aid groups in LA found it difficult for people to apply for restraining orders when the courts were closed by COVID. The LAPD responded by creating a guide distributed by patrols to navigate the virtual court.
“We’re always listening to what these different people are saying and what they’re seeing,” Sadanaga said of the prosecutors, nurses, legal services providers and others the officers work with.
In late 2009, Helen Buchel, 34, and her 12-year-old daughter, Brittany Passalacqua, were stabbed to death in her Geneva, New York, home.
Buchel’s boyfriend, John Brown, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and in 2010 was sentenced to 40 years to life in a plea deal that Buchel’s mother, Dale Cook Driscoll, said her family accepted so the grandson who found the bodies would not have to testify.
Reuters was unable to locate a lawyer for Brown, who remains in jail.
In Minnesota, Suomi was the first witness called by prosecutor Lauri Ketola.
Suomi said of her daughter, grandson and unborn grandchild after the verdict: “I finally got justice for them.”
(Reporting by Magali Druscovich and Maria Caspani; Additional reporting by Caitlin Ochs and Donna Bryson; Editing by Donna Bryson and Rosalba O’Brien)