Dawn Ostrem
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Aug 01/01) - A Yellowknife woman sits in her living room, as the sun spills over the floor and furniture from a large window.

The room is tidy, even though a few colourful childrens' toys are pushed off to the side, resembling a happy household with no problems.

But then she pulls herself up from the couch and walks to another room returning with an envelope. She confidently pulls out pictures of herself taken years earlier and places them on the coffee table.

In them, the same small-framed but tough woman looks devastated and violated, tiny and afraid. Her face and body was bruised and tortured. She keeps the police pictures so she doesn't forget the situation, as a reminder not to let herself ever return to an environment of abuse.

"After the separation it got worse," says the woman, who has asked not to be named.

"Definitely the physical threat and the feeling that I would be killed."

She's speaking of her ex-husband. It wasn't him who battered and raped her, but she believes he had someone else -- a friend -- do the job for him.

Police intervention

She finally got a restraining order against her ex-husband after he repeatedly said he was going to kill her. But shortly after that the beating and sexual assault happened.

After, she again went to the police and then to court. Nothing could be done to connect the rape to her ex-husband and the sentence her attacker received, she felt, was much too lenient.

"It was a joke," she spat. "I have a real problem with the criminal justice system, I think it is completely bias and I think women are still being blamed."

Numbers that pin down recorded domestic violence in Yellowknife cannot begin to tell the whole story, say most people involved in gathering them.

Most slaps and punches go unreported until it escalates into scenes involving police, ambulances and a crowd of neighbours watching as couples wearing oxygen masks and handcuffs come from behind their closed doors.

That was the case on July 8 at Fraser Arms West.

"I heard the sirens when the ambulance and police cars arrived in front of the building," says a resident of the apartment complex.

"Shortly after the ambulance (attendants) emerged with a man on a stretcher."

The woman in the common-law relationship was bruised, upset and said over and over that she was sorry as police escorted her away. She was charged with assault with a weapon and the man was later released from hospital with stab wounds.

Unfortunately, that situation was a common account of almost daily episodes of domestic violence in this small city even though it was unique for one reason -- the victim was a man.

Yellowknife family lawyer Katherine Peterson wrote a report for the Department of Justice in 1992 stating just that.

"While some would like to pretend otherwise it is simply not possible to look at violence in gender, neutral terms," she wrote in the report called Justice House.

"An overwhelming amount of violence is perpetrated by men and vast majority of victims are women."

Why not just leave?

"Women have a heightened risk of homicide after marital separation," states a report by Statistics Canada. The number of these murders between 1991 and 1999 made up 38 per cent of all homicides against women.

Local women's advocate Arlene Hache says the benefits of leaving still outweigh the risks.

"I think the woman is in danger, period," she says. "Because family violence escalates ... and will escalate to serious injury, maiming or to where the person ends up dead."

When family violence spirals to a point so intense it is not just the spouse who is in danger, she adds. As a part of the Statistics Canada survey an internal homicide study researched 169 cases. In those three per cent also included the killing of children.

The percentage may seem small but for the hamlet of Kugluktuk the effects are still resounding.

On March 26, 1997, Steven Ayalik did not kill his ex-spouse but murdered three of his five children by systematically shooting each in the head with a shotgun. He then shot himself.

"Evidence showed that he apparently confronted his 13-year-old stepdaughter ... in the bathroom," wrote chief coroner Percy Kinney in his report. "He placed the muzzle of the weapon in her mouth, pushed her down into the bathtub and fired, killing her instantly." Ayalik took the gun to a bedroom and shot his four-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. Another son awoke, wandered to the bedroom and saw his deceased siblings.

His father also pointed the shotgun at his frightened son but the boy waved it away. Ayalik, who had a violent police record including spousal assault, reconsidered and told him go to his grandmother's before he placed the barrel in his own mouth.

The coroner's report listed 17 recommendations.

In them there was a call for increased social services attention to spousal abuse and two-way communication with the RCMP, increased public awareness of domestic violence and counselling for it.

Those recommendations mirrored some set out in Peterson's 1992 report to the NWT justice system.

"Cultural conditioning underlies the problem," Peterson wrote. "An effective response ... requires a co-ordinated response on the part of various agencies at the community level."

She likened that to a model already existing in cases of child sexual abuse.

On March 13 of this year a man, 36, with no previous criminal record and a good job with BHP pleaded guilty to holding his former partner and two-year-old daughter hostage along the Ingraham Trail for close to 12 hours.

During the incident the daughter was inadvertently struck at one point while sitting on her mother's lap as the man threw out the blows.

The ex-spouse struggled to get away and hid in the bushes, cold and frightened, while the child was in the vehicle with her father for a lengthy period of time.

The woman returned for her daughter, later broke free again and a driver finally took her to the police detachment.

"He attempted to place the blame on the victim and that is totally inappropriate," said Crown counsel Sue Kendall, using the pre-sentence report written by a probation officer.

She asked the judge to sentence him to 12 to 13 months in jail "to ensure he can not force his will on (the victim) or any other woman."

Judge Robert Halifax sentenced him to nine months for assault causing bodily harm, uttering threats and forceable confinement to be served intermittently while he is on weeks off from work at BHP.

"There is a lot to be said about someone growing up in Yellowknife, your age, who has never been in trouble before," he said. "But this lady had to be terrorized and the courts take a very dim view on this kind of behaviour."

But that view was not dim enough, according to Hache.

"A judge should recognize that man is extremely dangerous," she says. "The legal system is obtuse. It leaves women and children, and to an extent, some men (involved in domestic violence) in danger."

About 15 years ago the legal system adopted a zero-tolerance policy on spousal assaults. Every reported instance, since then, has resulted in charges, lengthy court dockets and piles of paperwork.

Even so, police are only contacted 26 per cent of the time and most of those occur after separation, Statistics Canada reported.

Most victims felt police could have been more supportive in referring them to other support services, it also stated.

Once cases travel down court system routes many victims rarely find sentences doled out to abusive exes to be long enough.

Spousal assault often falls under general assault in the Criminal Code of Canada, usually collecting a prison term no longer than 10 years, but often much shorter.

Peterson's report says the solution falls not just in the courts.

"The administration of justice, while playing a very significant role in our society, can not be required to shoulder the full responsibility," she wrote. "It is a problem that must be addressed in the broadest possible dimensions."