Reviewing Fatalities
It may be cliché to say organizations like SafeHaven give voice to the voiceless, but I can’t think of another way to describe some of the work we do, specifically what happens in our county’s Fatality Review meeting. There are many goals this group strives to achieve, many lessons we try to learn for our community, but the point of the group is to give the victim the dignity of having her story told. Giving a homicide victim the time and attention of the group is the most valuable part of Fatality Review – it honors the connectedness the victim has to our community.
What is Fatality Review? Every year, a certain number of homicides are the end result of a domestic violence relationship. There are some telltale signs when this is the case. In our county, the Office of the Criminal District Attorney, in partnership with SafeHaven, leads the group, which consists of law enforcement, healthcare systems, and others. We take a detailed look into presumed intimate partner homicides and use a template of questions to get a clear picture of how that relationship looked and felt prior to the homicide. At the end of each case, we ask ourselves three important questions:
Was this an intimate partner homicide? You can see our definition below.
As an impact of what we’ve learned on this case, what policy changes could have helped this case end differently?
What improvements can our coordinated community response to domestic violence make that, had they been made prior to this case, could have changed the outcome?
We collectively ‘publish’ the Fatality Review every October, during Domestic Violence Awareness Month, we submit the final report to the Texas Council on Family Violence in Austin, and we also send it to the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative at Northern Arizona University. We believe the information is helpful to our community in order to make future policy and more clearly understand how the issue of intimate partner violence looks in Tarrant County.
Our definition of IPV homicide
An ongoing pattern of abusive behavior that can include physical violence, sexual violence, stalking, or psychological aggression (including coercive control) by a former or current intimate partner that is motivated by the offender’s desire for power and control over the victim, where the relationship ends in homicide.
