A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. We are a long way from done.  The line on the graph looks like a dip in the road – downhill for a few years after 2009, then slowly climbing back up over a decade starting in 2014. It tracks the number of police reports in Canada related to intimate partner violence. For a while, things were improving. But that’s over now, with violence rates (54 per 1,000 for Canadian women) now back to the levels of 15 years ago. Similar trends are evident in the US, where aggravated domestic assaults have risen to heights not seen in more than 20 years. What were we doing right for those good years? What did we start doing wrong? When the issue is something as deeply in the shadows as intimate partner violence, a clear answer is hard to come by. With 80 per cent of people experiencing IPV not even reporting the crime to police, any trend line is only ever scraping the surface. But the rising stress of daily life on P...

Scrambling to pack up as bylaw gets ready to close in In days gone by, I'd be out talking to people living homeless and hearing mostly about police. These days, it's all about City of Victoria bylaw enforcement. The city's bylaw department and many new bylaw hires have been given expansive new powers to seize people's stuff. The Streets and Traffic Bylaw lays out all the places where impoverished people aren't allowed to sit, stand or lie down, but it's the 2023 Property in Custody Bylaw that really gives the muscle. I'd like to share some sections from these bylaws, in hopes that someone who understands civic law might have ideas on how to push back against them. It's hard to believe that they could possibly be legal given the grand misery they are causing to people, none of whom have the capacity or the knowledge to stand up against them. As noted by one young fellow out there I spoke with, Michael, "maybe one per cent of the people out here kno...

And just like that, institutionalization is back.  My head is in a whirl. After untold hours of my early journalism career spent documenting the hard-won battle to banish BC's bad old institutions rife with abuse and civil-liberties violations, the former executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association is now the premier of the province and pitching involuntary care like it's a fresh new idea whose time has come.  “This announcement is the beginning of a new phase of our response to the addiction crisis," said Premier David Eby  in a statement released yesterday  in which government outlined how British Columbians could now be held against their will for mental illness, drug use or brain injury if they are making their communities feel "unsafe." "We’re going to respond to people struggling like any family member would. We are taking action to get them the care they need to keep them safe, and in doing so, keep our communities safe, too," said E...

Sharing an opinion piece I wrote this week that was published today in the Times Colonist , sparked by the sentencing of a serial assaulter of women.  Tyler Mark Denniston is going to jail. And on the one hand, that’s a win in the world of intimate partner violence, where 80 per cent of the crimes aren’t even reported to police and a conviction is far from certain. But the impact of the Greater Victoria man’s beatings will be felt by the women he attacked for so much longer than he’ll be in jail. That’s not just about having to live with the trauma - it’s about brain injury .  People experiencing intimate partner violence end up with a brain injury (IPV-BI) from that violence as frequently as 90 per cent of the time.  A majority of them, in fact, end up with multiple brain injuries, because intimate partner violence is rarely something that only happens once. Denniston was given a four-year jail term this week for attacking his then-girlfriend in 2018 and 2019. But he has...