Advocate calls for domestic violence preventative programs in wake of homicides

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Last week’s triple homicide in rural Manitoba should be a wake-up call that domestic violence is not just a city issue and that more needs to be done to prevent violence in small towns and rural areas across the province, a longtime advocate says.

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“There is still a perception that domestic violence and things like this don’t happen in small towns,” Coral Kendel, the executive director of the Pinawa-based Survivor’s Hope Crisis Centre said. “But nothing could be further from the truth.”

RCMP discovered a 41-year-old man’s body Friday morning on Road 84 West in the RM of McCreary. Police say the man was the victim of a self-inflicted wound. While at that scene, police received a request to do a wellness check on a 37-year-old woman.

Officers went to the woman’s house but found no one home, but continued their search at a nearby home, where they discovered the bodies of a 66-year-old woman, a 65-year-old man, and a 35-year-old man. The 37-year-old woman they had been searching for was found unharmed.

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RCMP are investigating three of the deaths as homicides. All five involved in the incident, including the four who are dead, were related.

McCreary is a small rural community of about 750 people located 230 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg.

Kendel, who has spent years working with survivors of domestic and sexual violence in the Pinawa area, stressed she does not know much regarding the specific circumstances of the incident in McCreary, but said the fact that all involved were related shows that domestic violence continues to be a serious issue in small rural communities, and is that often goes underreported.

“If people still don’t think this happens in small towns, it’s often because we find there is far more of a tendency in those smaller communities to try and keep the community mentality and keep things quiet,” Kendel said.

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“With small towns and with community Facebook groups, it quickly becomes everyone’s business and leads to people picking sides, and it can leave victims feeling ostracized if they think people do not believe them, or that people are gossiping about them.”

The homicides in McCreary mark the second mass homicide event to take place in rural Manitoba since the start of the year. In February a mother and four children who lived in Carman were found dead in multiple locations in and around Carman and were all victims of homicide.

During an unrelated media conference on Monday, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said the province is focused on taking steps to prevent domestic violence in Manitoba communities.

“So all of us react first with the shock and concern, and then we’re called to action to say, ‘how can we prevent things like this from happening again in the future.’” Kinew said. “And, of course, there is a broader societal conversation that we need to have around preventing violence in our communities.”

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Kendel believes the NDP government has taken the issue of domestic and gender-based violence seriously since taking office, but said far more needs to be invested into programs that are preventative.

“Especially when we talk about prevention, we do not have nearly enough,” Kendel said. “So much of the programs that are funded are meant to be support in the aftermath from what has already happened, and not preventative.”

Kendel said she believes one of the best tools to prevent domestic violence is education.

“We need a lot more education for youth in schools surrounding gender-based violence and healthy relationships,” she said. “And we need programs for men that maybe didn’t grow up in healthy or stable environments to learn how to better react to certain circumstances, and for women as well because we also know that women are perpetrators of violence.

“We need to take some big steps and see funding for the prevention side, because we can’t always just be reacting.”

Police have not yet identified any of the victims or people involved in the Friday incident, but said they hoped to release more information about their investigation sometime later this week.

— Dave Baxter is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of the Winnipeg Sun. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.

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