When we heard the news last Friday morning that a 32 year-old woman had been shot and killed in broad daylight on a busy Chelsea street, the first thought that immediately crossed our mind was: The husband or boyfriend did it. Just a few hours later, police announced that they had arrested a suspect, the victim’s 31 year-old estranged husband who, according to news reports, had called police to turn himself in.
We’ve been in the news business for longer than we care to remember and the world has changed in ways that were unimaginable when we began our career in journalism more than 50 years ago. But despite the changes in technology and societal attitudes regarding countless issues, the one constant that has remained is the pathology of domestic violence.
It still is the case today, just as it always has been, that a woman is more likely to suffer violence by a partner than from any other source. The statistics tell the tragic story: Nearly half of all women murdered in the United States are killed by a current or former intimate partner; 1 in 4 women will experience physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime; 1 in 3 women will experience some form of sexual violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime; and 1 in 6 women will experience stalking from an intimate partner in their lifetime.
It also has remained true that the most dangerous time for a woman in a relationship is the period when she first decides to leave her partner. The victim in the shooting this past week had been married to the suspect for 10 years, but they had become estranged only within the past two weeks.
In addition, an article in this week’s New York Times has highlighted another dangerous time period for women: According to the Times, the second-leading cause of death (other than from the pregnancy itself) for women who are pregnant or recently postpartum is domestic violence.
What also was not surprising about Friday’s tragic event is that a gun was used by the perpetrator. The mere presence of a firearm in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500% and more than half of intimate partner homicides are by firearm.
Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court recently let stand laws that exist in every state that require a person with a domestic violence restraining order to turn in his guns. However, there had not been a restraining order between the parties involved in Friday’s tragedy.
Domestic violence cuts across all racial and economic lines. Just the week before Friday’s incident (in which the victim and the suspect, both of whom are Haitian immigrants and are Black), it was announced that the Cohasset man who allegedly murdered and dismembered his wife — both of whom are white — at Christmas time two years ago will stand trial next year. We also would note that today’s Massachusetts domestic violence laws stem from the 1970s after an incident in that wealthy suburb of Cohasset in which the husband shot and killed his wife and then shot and wounded his children before turning the gun on himself.
We generally conclude our editorials by offering our view on what lawmakers or individuals can do in order to bring about societal change. However, when it comes to domestic violence, we have no ready solution to this long-standing problem. We can only recommend to women and anyone who is in an abusive relationship to end it immediately and seek help from law enforcement, the courts, and the many services available to victims of domestic violence in our communities. (In Chelsea, HarborCOV offers services for victims of domestic violence. Its 24 hour hotline number is 617-884-9909.)