N.S. committee reviewing domestic violence death shares recommendations with province

A Nova Scotia committee completed a review of intimate partner violence.

Recommendations have been released from a review committee looking into a person’s death in Nova Scotia due to domestic violence.

The recommendations, from the Domestic Violence Death Review Committee, were released Friday.

“In accordance with our marching orders, we are sit down and examine the circumstances behind an actual death and try to draw the lessons from it. So, this set of recommendations actually stems from our analysis of an actual death,” said Nova Scotia’s chief medical examiner and committee chair, Dr. Matthew Bowes.

“This was one death, although the lessons that we drew from this death will obviously be applicable to a lot of other cases.”

Recommendations from death review committees are made public under Nova Scotia’s Fatality Investigations Act.

All personal or identifying information is removed to protect the privacy of those involved before they are shared.

Bowes says the case being investigated in this committee is like many cases they’ve seen before.

“I think that the overarching lessons here are that there’s nothing really novel about what happened here. I mean, this is a familiar, unfortunately, a familiar story in our society, and that many commissions and many inquests and inquiries have met to consider this problem and that we need to get to work.”

The domestic violence review committee initially provided Justice Minister Scott Armstrong with a review report on Jan. 30, with recommendations to prevent a similar death in the future.

The committee began by saying the quality and level of services for domestic violence and intimate partner violence survivors are too variable across the province.

It also notes the services delivered in rural Nova Scotia are not as comprehensive as those in urban areas.

“Domestic violence is more common in rural areas than urban. I mean, we start publishing statistical reports once we get enough of these that we can confidently report on them, we’ll certainly be addressing that exact question,” said Bowes.

“The committee definitely notices that women in rural areas aren’t as well served by our system, and we need to grapple with that.”

Bowes adds there are many government agencies and non-profit organizations at work in the sector with great ideas, but there needs to be better communication between those bodies to give women the best care available.

“The thing that we noticed is that the group of agencies and organizations don’t always know what each other is doing, and some of them have developed really wonderful practices locally that just aren’t making their way into the practices of other similar people across the province,” he said.

“When you look at the sector as a whole, it would certainly benefit from some, if not centralized leadership, then at least a common forum for the exchange of these ideas so that women all over the province get the benefit of the collective wisdom, rather than the individual area.”

The six recommendations made by the committee are:

1. Promote consistency and effectiveness in programs and services across the province
2. Support enhanced curricula related to gender-based violence for all educators
3. Support enhanced access to mental health services in elementary schools
4. Support enhanced housing supports for victims of gender-based violence, including integrated access to wraparound services
5. Support service providers in their delivery of services to victims and survivors
6. Support men’s organizations in their delivery of violence prevention services

“The Committee notes that there is existing, ongoing work being done by the Status of Women Office, the Gender Based Violence Division of the Department of Justice, Education and Early Childhood Development, and Labour, Skills, and Immigration regarding development of curricula to address violence. The actions following from these recommendations should complement these initiatives,” the release reads.

The province has two other death review committees – the Child Death Review Committee and the Deaths in Custody Review Committee. Those review committees released recommendations last year.

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