Dave Baxter
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Winnipeg Sun
A horrific triple homicide in a rural Manitoba community last week should open up a conversation about the value of protection orders in this province, what they do to keep women safe and keep their abusers away, a longtime advocate said.
“For most abusers, it’s just a piece of paper,” said Deena Brock, the provincial coordinator for the Manitoba Association of Women’s Shelters (MAWS).
“I had someone say to me once, ‘it’s a piece of paper, it won’t stop a knife and it won’t stop a bullet.’”
Last Friday a woman escaped from her own home in the RM of McCreary, after her estranged common-law husband forced his way in with a firearm. While the woman hid in the woods for more than 10 hours, the man went to another home and shot and killed his wife’s mother and father and her brother. The man later died by a self-inflicted shotgun wound, leaving four people dead.
The woman who hid was later found physically unharmed, and on Wednesday RCMP Staff Sgt. Richard Sherring confirmed she had taken out a protection order against her husband in 2023, that legally prohibited him from having any direct contact with her.
Sherring said Wednesday the woman had also made “additional calls for service” since the order was taken out, and he said police responded to those calls “appropriately under the circumstances of those calls.”
Brock said she believes it is difficult for protection orders to be enforced, partly because there is no real way to constantly monitor the movements of those who are supposed to be following them.
But she says another reason is because in many cases abusers will not give up and not stop harassing someone, no matter what the consequences could be, or how many times they are told to stop.
“And we’ve heard it many times about women who are being followed to work, or they look out their window and he’s sitting across the street staring at the house, or he’s in the yard,” Brock said.
“And then we see with what happened last week that this man was willing to take his own life.”
After years of dealing with survivors of abuse, Brock said many victims also don’t feel comfortable with the idea of even taking out a protection order, and with what comes along with trying to get one in place.
“They know it will infuriate their abuser, so there is often just this palpable fear about doing that,” she said.
“And the process is difficult, because if you want to get a protection order you have to dig up all the events, and do a timeline and explain everything to a judge, so that’s very traumatic, and in some cases we are talking about years of abuse.”
And in rural areas like McCreary, Brock said protection orders are even more difficult to enforce, because of how spread out everything can be, and how far some homes are from the nearest police detachment or even the closest neighbour.
Brock says last week’s horrible events in McCreary show the “limitations” of protection orders, and said many who work with victims of abuse believe it’s time for governments and the justice system to look for ways to improve how those orders are enforced.
She said some solutions could include ankle bracelets for those who are at high risk to breach a protection order, or automatic mental health assessments for anyone arrested for domestic or gender-based violence.
“Those aren’t decisions for me to make, because that’s above my pay grade,” Brock said. “But we need to do something because it can’t just be a legal tool, it needs to do what it’s supposed to do.
“It needs to be a tool that protects women.”
— Dave Baxter is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of the Winnipeg Sun. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.
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