At the age of 9, April Haines witnessed the death of her mother at the hands of a drunken boyfriend. "It happened when my brother and sister were in the house," she recalled decades later. "My brother was trying to fight him off, stop him, and he hurt him, too. They took her away, she went into a coma, and I never saw her again."
The murder of a parent by an abusive spouse or domestic partner is a devastating event in the lives of families and children that inflicts psychological wounds that never fully heal. For the rest of their lives, the survivors carry a burden of grief and loss that is all but unimaginable to most people, with consequences that may only become apparent years after the initial trauma.
Yet until recently, such killings were treated by police and prosecutors more or less like any other murder. That only began to change in 2007, with the formation of the Baltimore City Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team, a multi-agency task force of police, prosecutors and women's advocates who made it their mission to reduce the number of domestic violence-related homicides by focusing on victims of abuse at highest risk of lethal harm.
On Wednesday, the team announced the first encouraging sign that their approach is working: Homicides related to domestic violence in the city are down sharply compared to the last few years. The city recorded 13 domestic homicides in 2007 and 14 in 2008, but so far, there have only been four this year. If the trend continues, the city could see a better than 50 percent reduction in such killings by year's end.
The task force members credit that success to better cooperation between the state's attorney office, the police department and victim advocates such as the Baltimore House of Ruth, which sends trained workers to act as first responders alongside police at the scene of reported abuse cases. The combined effort has helped secure stiffer prison sentences for violent domestic partners and significantly increased the number of warrants served on suspected abusers.
But much remains to be done. The team recommended the creation of a one-stop family justice center in Baltimore to provide legal services and counseling to abuse victims similar to facilities in Montgomery and Harford counties. But so far, that idea has gone nowhere. The group also called for more thorough assessments of children in violent households, like the young Ms. Haines, who witness a parent suffer serious or fatal injuries as a result of abuse.
