What Is Domestic Violence?

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Prior domestic violence is a serious and documented risk factor for intimate partner homicide.

But the absence of a police record is not the absence of danger.

The factors that predict whether a woman will be killed rarely generate police reports or criminal records.

Official systems are best at detecting the type of domestic violence least likely to end in death.

A new study out of Australia made a finding that at first sounds reassuring: in a database of more than 62,000 violent incidents, cases flagged by police as domestic violence were less likely to end in homicide than other violent incidents. If you're in a relationship where things have gotten physical, you might read that and exhale.

But the finding reflects how inconsistently police record domestic violence, not how dangerous it is. And something else; The cases most likely to end in murder are sometimes cases where official systems saw very little, or nothing at all. Two cases are frightening examples.

When the Danger Is Seeable But the System Is Blind

On February 19, 2020, in the Brisbane suburb of Camp Hill, Rowan Baxter jumped into the car of his estranged wife, Hannah Clarke, as she was leaving her parents' home on the school run. He doused the car in gasoline and set it on fire. Hannah, 31, managed to pull herself from the burning vehicle and told bystanders and first responders what had happened before dying in the hospital that evening with burns to 97 percent of her body. Their three children, Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4, and Trey, 3, died in the car. Baxter stabbed himself at the scene.

A Domestic Violence Protection Order had been in place. Hannah had been in contact with the police and a domestic violence caseworker. She had told the caseworker that, on one occasion, Baxter strangled her, one of the strongest........

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