Life sentence for victims of intimate partner violence

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 a history of major assaults of previous girlfriends before that, all of a type most associated with brain injury. He strangles his intimate partners. Hits them in the head. Smashes their heads into furniture.

One of his victims said in an impact statement at Denniston’s trial that since her abuse, she has become someone she doesn’t recognize. She has trouble falling asleep, has terrible nightmares when she does, and is experiencing periods of explosive anger, panic and suicidal thoughts.

Whether she knows it or not, that could be because she is now living with a brain injury on top of all the trauma she has endured.

But if she’s like the vast majority of victims of intimate partner violence, her brain injury will go undiagnosed and unsupported. IPV-BI is such a newly emerging concept that even victims themselves don’t think about whether they’ve incurred a brain injury. The impact of their untreated brain injury can put them at risk of losing their job, their housing, their kids and so much more, and they won’t even know why.

It seems unbelievable that a woman who is beaten by her partner violently enough to incur a brain injury could suddenly find herself on the precipice of profound poverty, homelessness, child-protection involvement and social isolation as a result of the assault. Surely services are there to support her, or she could move to the head of the line for housing and supports to keep her safe?

Unfortunately, there are no designated services at any level – in BC or Canada – specifically for people experiencing IPV-BI. While some bright spots are emerging within Island Health around piloting occupational therapy assessments as a means of helping victims get past diagnosis barriers, that work is in its earliest days.

More broadly, there are no guidelines for health professionals to follow to ascertain IPV-BI-caused injury. No overarching plan. No targeted funding. No consensus as to what should be done, or data being collected.

And if work on all of that got going tomorrow, there are other hurdles. Start with the fact that only one in five women beaten by their partners even report the assault to police, rendering most victims of IPV-BI completely invisible in our systems.

Add in the stigma, lack of witnesses and fear factor for the victim around doing anything that might spark a whole other assault, and it’s not surprising that the majority of women aren’t even going to visit the doctor about that hit to the head they took, or after they’ve regained consciousness from being strangled.

And even when they do seek medical attention, there are no provincially funded community services for them unless their concussion shows up on an MRI scan. Which is not often the case, because it’s an injury that doesn’t show up well on an MRI, and is much better diagnosed through its impact on a woman’s ability to function.

At any rate, unless a woman can pay for that assessment of her functioning, and the services she needs as a result of what’s discovered, she’s never going to get that support anyway. It was nice to see IPV-BI get some solid mentions last fall in the BC government’s Safe and Supported action plan against gender-based violence, but we are so badly overdue for some genuine action on this appalling state of affairs.

So yes, Tyler Mark Denniston is going to jail. But he’ll be out in not much more than a couple of years if he behaves himself, and his life will carry on pretty much the way it always has. His victims, on the other hand, have been handed a life sentence.

Jody Paterson is a lobbyist and advocate on the issue of intimate partner violence and brain injury on behalf of The Cridge Centre for the Family and the Board Voice Society of BC.

Don't let racist element blur the view on stupid boys fighting

Nobody needs an ugly video of a three-on-one street fight in Courtenay to remind them that racism is alive and well in our country and around the world. We humans always need an enemy, and physical appearance has long been an easy fallback for the purposes of defining “us” and “them.”
I feel sorry for the town of Courtenay, which in my experience is no more of a hotbed of racism than any other community. I grew up there and did see quite a bit of street-fighting in my teen years, however, most of it involving stupid young guys fighting for no particular reason.
When racial taunts were available to the boys of my generation, I expect they used them. Courtenay was a fairly white town in those days, though, so they generally needed a different excuse for singling someone out for a roughing up. But there was always some hurtful insult available if a guy needed to goad somebody into a fight.
I know we’d like to think we’ve changed as a society since then. But what I see most clearly in the sad video footage of Jay Phillips getting jumped on in Courtenay last week is just more proof that the legacy of stupid young guys lives on.
In this case, the three young men allegedly started the fight by grabbing the most obvious racial epithet to hurl at Phillips. But I hope we don’t get so lost in the race issue that we overlook the very unsocial fact of guys fighting each other in the street. Yes, racism is a terrible thing, but to see Phillips’ attackers conveniently packaged as “white supremacists” is to completely miss the point that the problem at the core of this incident is violence.
More than 8,400 people have already seen the video of the street fight uploaded to YouTube. More than 220 people have commented, almost all of them condemning Phillips’ attackers for racist and cowardly behaviour. Headlined “Black Man Fights Off White Supremacists,” the video is hard to miss. Courtenay will wear the shame for years to come.
The truth is, such fights go on among young men everywhere. To categorize this as a racial problem in Courtenay is to miss the point that stupid boys fighting is a problem that continues to elude us in every community. Even the vicious gang wars in Vancouver boil down to stupid boys fighting, albeit with much more sophisticated weaponry.
Ask Victoria Police how they spend their Saturday nights downtown. They’ll tell you all about the stupid boys fighting after the bar closes, hurling their share of racial slurs and insults to heat things up.
Were there to be a bright new future where nobody used racial slurs, those guys would just latch onto some other equally offensive name-calling for their fights. The whole point is to offend.
Of course, we’re not talking about all young men. Only a small minority are violent - affirmation that we’re doing many things right. But we’re still ending up with a persistent population of young men looking for a fight.
Anybody can find a fight if they’re looking for one. In the Courtenay case, the three young men were reportedly driving around in their now-infamous red truck and called out a racial epithet as they passed Phillips. When he swore back at them, they stopped their truck and swarmed him.
If I thought jail worked as a deterrent for unsocial behaviour, I’d have turned into a law and order type a long time ago. But prison time alone does little, and the macho atmosphere just amplifies angry-young-man syndrome. What really needs to happen with those three men and all the generations to come if the goal is to curb the anti-social behaviour of (some) young men?
If convicted of assault, I imagine the Courtenay guys will end up with a court order aimed at giving them an education about racial tolerance - volunteer hours at the multicultural centre or some such thing. Good idea. So is an anger-management course. The good news is that they’ll likely give up such foolishness in a few years no matter what, because street-fighting is by and large a young man’s game.
But what about the young men who never get caught on film? What of the generations of boys to come - the ones who need to see past the racism of the Phillips attack and into the senseless violence at its core? Yelling racial epithets is unacceptable, but beating people up is the bigger problem here.
Credit the new age of public videotaping for once again bringing an ugly human moment to our attention. Now what?