Community Safety and Well-Being Plan for Huron County to Launch Social Media Campaign
by Bob Montgomery
The Community Safety and Well-Being Committee for Huron County is launching a new social media campaign to bring awareness and educate the community about Intimate Partner Violence.
Accessibility and Health & Safety Manager Michaela Johnston says the campaign is a part of the Community Safety and Well-Being Plan for Huron County that was established by the lower-tier municipalities in 2021 and will feature information, education and support resources for all community members, including those who have been impacted by Intimate Partner Violence.
Huron OPP Inspector Jason Younan says in 2023, Huron County OPP had 765 occurrences related to intimate partner violence, a staggering number of occurrences for our small community.
Corey Allison is the Executive Director of the Women’s Shelter and Second Stage Housing and Counselling Services. She says women who live in rural communities are two and a half times more likely to experience death or lethality by Intimate Partner Violence then their counterparts in urban centres. “My instinct would be that that is about the isolation, the lack of resources for support, the shame that comes with coming forward and sharing their experience and in rural communities there's more access to guns, so fatalities can happen at a greater rate in rural communities.”
Allison says something she finds particularly disturbing and preventable, is the number of times after a partner has lost their life, it's discovered that the accused person has a history of violent behaviour or is out on parole for a violent crime. “It's been part of every death review since they began in 1991 that collaboration and coordination are the most critical factors in preventing death by Intimate Partner Violence. So on the other side of the death, when we look backwards, often different parts of the community, maybe a family doctor, maybe the police, maybe the women's shelter, community mental health, we all maybe have worked or had information that would have informed the level of risk and that that risk was high enough to be considered high risk for lethality if all of the information was together.”
And Allison says over the years, despite their best efforts, they have not found a way to make that happen. In her fifteen years in this field she has also never seen the kind of collaboration that is happening now. “In Huron County right now we have leaders from across the community from hospital health, community mental health, the women's shelters, Children's Aid, Police, Victims Services that are working together to create a process so that if a high risk case comes on any of our radar, we can quickly come together, and put all of the information that we have together, to do an informed risk assessment that would help us keep that family safe.”
One further challenge to this, is that most of these groups are funded to respond to the crisis after it has happened. But she's very optimistic because this is one of the first times in her career that she's seen this amount of energy, time and resources being funnelled towards prevention, which requires a different way of thinking and understanding the issue.
The campaign will also feature access to FREE one-hour online training designed to help neighbours, friends and families recognize the risks of IPV and how to respond and refer to the appropriate services in Huron County. The campaign will start today, April 1st, and be pushed out by all municipalities and various agencies and organizations connected to the Community Safety and Well-Being Committee for Huron County.
