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Domestic Violence

Throughout most of my service in the police business, domestic violence was swept aside by advising the victim to come to the police office on the next business day to start the process by the swearing of information, charging the perpetrator with assault. The victims chose not to, or were too terrified to start a court action in nearly every instance. In the few cases where the process was started, only a very small number actually went to court.

The threat of prosecution and its ensuing publicity could make a teetotaling, gentle and loving, generous and providing husband-of-the-year out of the most brutal wife-beating bastard in the community. Unfortunately, these amazing metamorphoses usually only lasted long enough to convince the victim to drop the court action.

Many of us were shocked by the first few domestic incidents we attended under the guidance of a more senior policeman. We witnessed assaults, or the result of assaults, which left us sickened and wishing that somehow the victim would gather the courage to take revenge in some form, or at least get out of the abusive relationship. This rarely happened, though. In most cases, the abuse just went on and the recipient somehow managed to survive for another day and another beating. Most, but not all.

We were frequently called to a particular home to deal with severe assaults on the wife. The husband was often drunk; he seemed to believe that his behaviour was a normal part of family life. He was always extremely abusive to us and we used extra caution in dealing with him. After one particularly severe incident we removed the beaten woman and her children from the house.

There were no facilities to temporarily house such victims in that community, so we took them to the hospital emergency room. After her injuries were treated, she called her sister to pick her up. The sister’s husband was a huge but gentle man who worked as a logger. When the sisters arrived at the logger’s home and he saw what had been done to her, he called one of his co-worker friends. The two loggers paid a visit to the perpetrator. During the course of this visit the perpetrator learned the finer points of being on the receiving end of extreme violence. At times during the visit he was afraid he would die, and at other times he was afraid he would not. He recovered as a changed man and his family life was greatly improved. He had not only developed a great respect for his brother-in-law, but he would often thank him for showing him the error of his ways.

The majority of domestic violence incidents involved the woman taking the brunt of the abuse. However, I recall a few cases where this was not true. We had frequent contact with a Native couple, Ernie and Mimi, where the husband was a very thin, smaller-than-average man while the wife was a very strong, much-larger-than-average woman. These two shared an insatiable thirst and their constant efforts to quench this problem led to frequent disagreements between them. Their disagreements always became physical and little Ernie always got the worst of it.

One summer evening they came to the police office in their usual drunken condition. As they entered the front door, Ernie showed us his black eye and swollen mouth and announced that he wanted a divorce. One of the constables got up from his desk and as he walked to meet them at the front counter he said, “We do have a couple of those left over, so you have come at the right time.” He asked them to take a seat while the divorce papers were prepared.

They sat down and the constable rolled a piece of blue legal paper into the typewriter and typed “Decree of Divorce” across the top. In the next five minutes the document was composed, with several “wherefores” and “hereafters,” and provisions for the signatures of the combatants and witnesses. At the constable’s request, Ernie and Mimi both signed the paper and it was duly witnessed. As the pair left the office, the little man turned to the left and the big woman went off to the right.

Later, they must have forgotten about the divorce or chosen to disregard it, because the couple remained as much a part of the fabric of the town as they had ever been.

On rare occasions we found humour in an incident of domestic violence. This was partly due to the twisted view of calloused veteran police officers, and partly to the tendency in all of us to see a little humour in the misfortunes of others.

One such instance unfolded near a small interior community where I was working. My partner and I were the only two on duty for the afternoon shift of a midsummer Saturday. The day shift had been on the run all day; they were several calls behind when Dave and I came to work at four o’clock. Dave and I became responsible for all calls after four, while the day shift would work until they had cleared all the calls received before that time. The most memorable call of our shift came in at about four p.m.

The person who took the call was a very experienced worker at our office. She was often able to resolve problems over the telephone by applying a wealth of common sense and diplomacy. This lady had been hired to guard prisoners in our cells, but the volume of our work demanded that the guard also take telephone messages and attend the front counter. Our guards were carefully chosen because a competent guard was as good as having another uniformed policeman on the job.

When the call came in, our guard knew immediately who it was. She completed the name and address section of the complaint form from memory as she listened to the details from the inebriated caller. Our guard also noted that she could hear, in the background, an adult female crying like a child in a temper tantrum.

The call was from one of our regular clients, advising that her husband had assaulted her friend who was visiting from a residence nearby. Our guard tried to get more information about the nature of the assault but the caller was reluctant to provide details. She insisted that the police attend immediately to see for themselves what he had done. She did say that immediately after the assault her husband had walked away into the bush.

The caller lived in an area about four miles from town at the end of a dirt road. People chose to live there because it was inexpensive. The dwellings were either run-down mobile homes or shacks thrown together from salvaged material. Electricity was the only service they had. The land around the community was covered in thick bush.

The caller and her common-law husband had lived in one of the weathered mobile homes for several years. The greatest common bond between these two was a lust for drink. Their drinking resulted in numerous calls to our office wherein they complained about assaults on each other or the theft of liquor. The complaints to the police were always received when their supply of booze was running low and they were faced with the ugly fact that the party and the weekend were over.

This call, however, had an unusual twist: the husband was sober. On Friday there was a mechanical problem at the mill where he worked and he had promised to go in on Saturday to help in getting the mill operational again. He spent Friday night at a bar in town with his wife, and at the end of the night they picked up two dozen beer to take home. The husband planned that they would drink that beer together when he got home from the mill the next afternoon.

Saturday morning the husband was up early and off to work. The wife stayed home with the beer. It was around ten o’clock when she met her friend from a few doors away. They chatted for a while until the wife invited her friend over to have a beer. The friend eagerly accepted the invitation. One beer at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning will always lead to another. Four o’clock in the afternoon saw the last of the twenty-four beer and the husband due home at any time. I do not think the two women fully appreciated the gravity of their situation because of the effects of the liquor.

The husband finished his work a little early and he hurried toward home and the beer he had so thoughtfully laid in the night before. He coaxed his tired old truck as fast as it could to make it up the hill to the beer. He slid to a stop in a cloud of dust in front of the trailer. Before the dust had blown away he was inside looking for a beer. The smell in the trailer and a quick look at the two women told him what had happened. He had been very thirsty, but now he was thirsty and very angry.

The two women could be politely described as “abundant.” They both wore brightly coloured pants of a new-to-that-era stretchy material. Perhaps they dressed in that way only because they did not have access to a mirror that provided a rear view. The wife had red stretch pants and her friend’s were fluorescent yellow-green.

When Dave and I arrived at the scene of the crime we were immediately informed that the husband had struck the friend with a board. The two women showed us a piece of one-by-four lumber about four feet long and confirmed that this had been the weapon. The wife urged her friend to “show them what he did.” The friend lurched to her feet as she pulled down her stretch pants and panties and turned to present us with the “full moon.” This presentation left no doubt in our minds that the assault had taken place as the two described it. A bright red welt ran across the full expanse of the crime scene; it was the same width as the board and was continuous except for a break near the centre. The welt was approximately three feet long.

Dave and I left the trailer to regain our composure and to discuss the possibility of recording the crime scene on film. We decided that photographs would not be necessary.

Through inquiries with neighbours we learned that the husband had requested and gotten a ride to town and would not likely be back until the next day.

We returned to the trailer and advised the two women that the perpetrator had left the area. We also told them to think it over and if they wished to pursue charges to contact our office on the following Monday morning. We heard no more of that incident.