As lockdown lingers, a rural reckoning with domestic violence – By Sara Miller Llana & Moira Donovan (CS Monitor) / June 15 2020
Amid the pandemic, activists have been alert for increases in domestic violence, as abusers and their victims are forced into close quarters. The problem appears most acute in rural areas.
Before he perpetrated the worst mass shooting in Canada’s history, the gunman had allegedly inflicted something lamentably more mundane: violence against his partner.
And if Nova Scotia was shocked by the 13-hour rampage through its rural hinterland that resulted in 23 deaths, including the gunman’s, in the middle of a global pandemic, it was less startled when a former neighbor of the gunman in Portapique told the media he had a history of domestic abuse.
That included one incident that she says she reported to police in 2013, in which he is alleged to have beaten and strangled his female partner before three male witnesses. It was not the first incident to be “whispered about” yet not confronted.
“I think sometimes in rural Nova Scotia, there is this culture of not speaking out, of minding your own business, not rocking the boat,” says Johannah Black, the bystander intervention program coordinator with the Antigonish Women’s Resource Centre, a women’s shelter serving two rural counties in Nova Scotia. “That is something that leads to isolation, to not having these discussions, to looking the other way.”
Continue to article: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2020/0615/As-lockdown-lingers-a-rural-reckoning-with-domestic-violence
