America’s Deadly Epidemic: Violence Against Women

Tammy Suomi’s living room in Minnesota is filled with memories of her daughter Jackie Defoe, and on the sofa are her grandson Kevin Shabaiash Jr’s teddy bears. Photos of her smiling loved ones cover a 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 her home in the Fond du Lac American Indian Reservation near Duluth.

In May, a jury convicted Defoe’s friend Sheldon Thompson of first degree murder in the deaths of Defoe, her unborn child and Kevin. He was sentenced to three life terms and was denied parole for the murders of Defoe and Kevin. Attempts to reach Thompson through his attorney were unsuccessful.

The murders illustrate an ongoing US crisis. According to the Violence Policy Center (VPC), a national think tank, in 2019 nine out of ten murdered women were murdered by men they knew. In nearly two-thirds of those cases, the women were wives or other intimate partners of the men.

Often such murders follow years of abuse, with six experts interviewed by Reuters raising questions about how police, courts and society at large support women.

In such crimes, attacker and target know each other through and through and may have children and a house together and intertwined finances, making the challenge complex.

“It’s cultural. It’s religious. It’s psychological. It’s many layers,” says Detective Riasharo Garcenila, who helps coordinate the Los Angeles Police Department’s response to domestic violence. “It’s so hard to have one answer for a multi-layered crime.”

The statistics are particularly grim in communities of color. In Minnesota, like Defoe, 9 percent of all girls and women murdered between 2010 and 2019 were Native Americans, although they make up just 1 percent of the state’s population, according to the Minnesota Task Force on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. created by the state legislature to report to lawmakers on efforts to document, understand, and reduce violence.

In 2019, black women and girls were murdered more than twice as often as white women and girls, according to the Washington-based VPC, which bases its numbers on FBI data.

New Federal Movements

US President Joe Biden signed a spending bill earlier this year that included increased funding for housing, legal and other support for victims of domestic violence. In June, he signed gun reform legislation that seeks to do more to keep guns out of the hands of those convicted of domestic violence.

Three decades have passed since Nicole Sharpe’s father shot and murdered her mother in their Brooklyn apartment. Sharpe’s father, who died in 2012, was convicted of manslaughter in 1993 and served 16 years.

“I don’t think in people’s minds that domestic violence has really changed too much” since her mother’s death, Sharpe says. “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, says that in the 13 years since she helped set up her domestic violence unit, she has changed some views.

“When I started this, it was that she… [women] were not believed or they were fired by the police and even the community,” says Fields. “In general, that has improved considerably in our country.”

For example, she says officers in her jurisdiction have learned that medical evidence shows repeated beatings and that choking victims can sound incoherent.

A persistent challenge for researchers is determining the extent of the problem. Datasets like the FBI’s supplemental murder reports can be helpful, but they leave difficult-to-fill gaps in tracking gender-related murders, says associate professor Alison Marganski, director of criminology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse.

The picture is mixed with fears that the recent pandemic lockdowns are exacerbating domestic violence. James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University, analyzed FBI data and found that the number of homicides in family situations rose by 26 percent in 2020 from the previous year.

But a January article published by the unbiased National Bureau of Economic Research, which examined data from 17 major urban police forces, found no statistically significant difference in the number of homicides of intimate partners before and during the pandemic.

Detective Marie Sadanaga, a colleague of Garcenila’s, says legal aid groups in LA found people were struggling to file for restraining orders as Covid closed courts. The LAPD responded by creating a guide to navigating virtual courts distributed by patrol officers.

“We always listen to what these different people are saying and seeing,” Sadanaga says of prosecutors, nurses, legal professionals and others with whom agents work.

In late 2009, Helen Buchel and her 12-year-old daughter, Brittany Passalacqua, were stabbed to death at her home in Geneva, New York.

Buchel’s boyfriend, John Brown, pleaded guilty to first degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison in 2010 in a plea deal accepted by her family, according to Buchel’s mother, Dale Cook Driscoll, so that her grandson, who found the bodies , should not testify.

Reuters was unable to find a lawyer for Brown, who is still in prison.

In Minnesota, Finland, the first witness to call prosecutor Lauri Ketola.

After the verdict, Suomi said of her daughter, grandson and unborn grandchild, “I finally got justice for them.”

Photography by Magali Druscovich and Caitlin Ochs

Reuters