MEDIA STATEMENT
For Immediate Release
July 19, 2025
Another Woman Killed in Richmond: Gender-Based Violence Is the Public Safety Crisis of Our Time
Vancouver, BC – Battered Women’s Support Services (BWSS) is responding with sorrow and urgency to yet another killing of a woman in British Columbia—this time in Richmond, where police have arrested a man and stated that “there is no further risk to the public.”
This language is not neutral. It signals to the public that the situation is contained and resolved, that there is nothing more to fear, and that institutions have regained control. But the truth is that another woman is dead. And in just 17 days, across six different cities in this province, five women have been killed, and three others have been seriously injured—most were harmed by a man known to them. What happened in Abbotsford, Kelowna, Surrey, Langley, Vancouver and now Richmond is not an isolated tragedy. It is a repeating and escalating pattern of gender-based violence that continues to be mischaracterized as random, private, and exceptional.
When officials say there is no risk to the public, they are excluding the very people most at risk from their definition of public. They are rendering women invisible in the scope of institutional concern. These statements not only mislead, but they also protect the systems that failed to intervene. They deny the scale of the crisis and allow elected officials, police, and Crown prosecutors to remain silent while more lives are lost.
The data is irrefutable. As the Dr. Kim Stanton Report on systemic failures in the legal system noted, forty-eight percent of women and girls aged fifteen and older in B.C. have experienced intimate partner violence. Nearly half of women across the province are living with the aftermath or threat of violence—whether physical, sexual, psychological, or economic. And yet, public safety policies continue to treat gender-based violence and violence against women as secondary, invisible, or already addressed
We are now witnessing the result of that neglect where a woman is killed, and there is no emergency declared, the risk is named as over, while the cycle is allowed to continue. For every woman killed there thousand more who are living in fear.
This moment demands more than declarations or sympathy. It requires sustained and coordinated action from every level of government. Municipal governments must stop waiting for provincial direction and begin treating gender-based violence as the public safety emergency it is. Provincial ministries must coordinate across housing, health, justice, and education systems to disrupt the patterns that allow women to be killed despite repeated calls for help. The federal government must move beyond statements of commitment and legislate mandatory standards for risk assessment, prevention, and accountability across the country.
This province cannot keep building our public safety response on language that excludes survivors and institutions that protect the status quo. Public safety must be redefined to include those who are most at risk of harm. It must be proactive, not reactive. And it must be designed with survivors in mind from the outset—not added in after the violence has already occurred.
This is not just a series of individual tragedies, the violence is happening to members of the public and is a reflection on a collective failure. Until we confront that reality, the pattern will persist, and women will continue to die under the silence of institutional reassurance.
