A woman in Saanich, BC is dead.
Public reporting shows the accused had previously breached a court order involving an intimate partner. That is not a neutral detail. It is a known risk indicator.
Two years ago, BWSS released Justice or “Just a Piece of Paper?” because we were seeing the same warning signs over and over: court orders issued without enforcement, breaches treated as administrative failures rather than signals of escalating danger, and systems that respond after violence instead of preventing it.
We wrote that report because breaches of court orders are not paperwork problems instead they are moments where the system has clear notice that someone may be in lethal danger. When those moments do not trigger immediate, coordinated risk response by the system, women are left exposed.
Criminal and family law systems issue protection orders independently, without a shared risk framework or coordinated enforcement. When breaches fall between those systems, accountability disappears and women are left exposed to escalating, often lethal, violence.
We do not need all the details of this case to name what is already clear, that a breach occurred that the criminal system knew that the response was insufficient and now woman is now dead.
This is why femicide prevention cannot rely on court orders alone…intimate partner violence requires enforcement, mandatory risk assessment when orders are breached, and real system accountability before harm becomes fatal, not after.
