Despite the "Why doesn't she just leave?" meme (excellent answers here) , statistics indicate that most battered women are killed by their assaulter at the time they leave or shortly thereafter.
Despite this well-known information, authorities routinely underestimate the lethality of these men and the risks to the women and children they torment. This is especially evident in court decisions that indiscriminately award batterers visiting/custody rights, in men being sprung from jail without forewarning their victims and in at-best sloppy responses to calls for help and support.
This sloppiness was confirmed again yesterday in St-Jean-de-Matha (Quebec), when a 67-yr old woman was knifed to death by the man she was in the process of divorcing. It happened when when she returned home to move out her things, accompanied by a Sûreté du Québec police officer.
Although the police had been called there the day before for yet another flare-up of wife battering, that asshat cop left the woman alone to go move his car out of the driveway. Her husband immediately killed her.
This has happened before in Quebec. Why isn't there a strictly-enforced protocol demanding that police officers never leave a victim alone with her assaulter in such a high-risk situation? Why aren't batterers taken away until a battered woman has had the time to get out of harm's way?
If there is, we certainly won't know about it, since the Sûreté du Québec has adopted the now familiar "cover thy butt" stance.
Similar stories in your neck of the woods or is this a Quebec quirk?