She Was Doing Everything Right. The System Wasn’t.

Bailey McCourt was a mother of two, trying to rebuild her life after surviving intimate partner violence. She had done what the system told her to do—she reported the abuse, engaged with both criminal and family court, and trusted that legal system would protect her and her daughters.

She was raising her children, one of whom was his.

Her ex-partner was charged with choking and threatening her. He was released on bail with a $500 deposit. Charges continued to accumulate. And still, she tried to navigate parenting, safety, and survival—while he remained free.

On July 4, 2025, he was convicted of assault. He walked out of court. Hours later, he killed her with a hammer.

This happened in Kelowna, British Columbia. But it could have happened in any city, in any country where the violence of men is minimized, where legal systems delay action, and where victims are expected to keep themselves safe while offenders are given time, leniency, and second chances.

This wasn’t a tragedy. It was a systemic failure.

Who Was Responsible for Keeping Her Safe?

This case involved multiple institutions:

• RCMP Domestic Violence Unit, which presumably was monitoring his case and was responsible for enforcing conditions.
• Crown Counsel, who chose not to seek detention post-conviction.
• Provincial Court Judges, who scheduled sentencing months out and allowed him to remain free.
• Family Court, which was managing parenting time and safety for the two daughters—one of them his.
• Bail Supervision and Corrections, tasked with ensuring compliance.
• Community-based services, most likely offered to him—likely not backed by mandatory accountability or structured risk monitoring.

Why Services for Abusive Men Alone Aren’t Enough

There is often a quiet assumption that if an abusive man is offered counselling or support services, risk is being addressed.

But offering services to someone who poses a serious risk is not the same as ensuring safety for the person they’ve harmed.

What This Case Reveals—Everywhere

Around the world, femicide follows a hauntingly familiar pattern. A woman reports abuse. The perpetrator is already known to police. Charges are laid, but the court system delays. Institutions retreat behind procedure. And in the end, she is left unprotected—exposed to the very violence she sought protection from.

These are not unfortunate oversights or isolated lapses. They are deliberate choices made by systems that were never truly designed to protect survivors. The mechanisms of justice remain structured around containment of process, not prevention of harm.

What Must Change—Now

To end this pattern, we must stop treating gender-based violence and violence against women as a private matter or a peripheral concern. It must be understood and addressed as a central public safety crisis.

This begins with the mandatory and universal use of standardized gender specific risk assessments in both criminal and family court. When lethality indicators are present, post-conviction detention must be the default—not the exception.

We need real-time coordination across all actors in the system: police, Crown counsel, the judiciary, family law, and community supervision. These institutions must stop working in silos. Lives depend on it.

Above all, we need a fundamental shift in orientation. The organizing principle of every intervention must be victim-survivor safety—not procedural efficiency or deference to the accused’s freedom.

This Was Preventable. And It Is Not Unique.

Had three women in British Columbia been killed by a stranger in the same week, the province would have declared a public emergency. There would have been news conferences, inter-ministerial meetings, and swift policy action.

But because the danger came from partners and ex-partners—because it was intimate violence, not random—the system remained silent.

This case is not about one courtroom or one man. It is about a structure that persistently refuses to treat male violence as a systemic threat. And it is about the cost of that refusal—paid in the lives of women like Bailey McCourt, again and again.

Bailey deserved to be protected. Her daughters deserved to grow up with their mother. The public deserves institutions that will finally say “never again”—and act like they mean it.

What the murder of Bailey McCourt reveals about a justice system that still doesn’t take women’s lives seriously.

Bailey McCourt did everything she was told to do.

1. She reported the abuse.
2. She went to court.
3. She trusted the process.

And still, the system failed her.

James Plover, the man who murdered Bailey (allegedly), had already been convicted of assaulting her. That assault included choking—one of the most well-established warning signs of lethal intimate partner violence. In any functioning public safety system, that conviction would have triggered immediate and coordinated intervention. In British Columbia, it triggered his release.

Despite the conviction, the charges were stayed. The risk was not reassessed. He walked free.
And days later, Bailey was dead.

This wasn’t a failure of knowledge. It was a failure of will at all levels of the system as outlined in Dr. Kim Stanton’s systemic review of the legal system in BC.

A Missed Chance to Prevent Femicide

Strangulation is not just another form of violence. It is a documented precursor to homicide. Studies show that women who are strangled by their partners are seven times more likely to be killed later. In courtrooms, that data is available. To Crown Counsel, it is familiar. To police and risk assessors, it is supposed to be a red flag.

So why didn’t anyone act?

Because in British Columbia, there is still no standardized lethality risk assessment tool used consistently across criminal and family law. And there is still no accountability in the criminal or family law legal systems.
Because prosecutors are not required to factor femicide risk into decisions about charges or sentencing.
Because there is no provincial fatality review process that tracks what’s being missed—until another woman is killed.

Bailey’s case was treated like a routine assault. Not as part of a dangerous, escalating pattern.

A Structural Collapse, Not a Tragic Anomaly

This is not about one woman and one man. This is about how the entire system continues to deprioritize women’s safety—even when the evidence is right in front of them. The Crown stayed the charges. The court released a convicted abuser. No agency reassessed risk or intervened. That’s not a glitch in the system—it is the system.

And it’s not unique to Bailey McCourt.

She is now one of three women killed in one week in British Columbia in connection to intimate partner violence. 
And yet, the silence continues.
No coordinated response. No ministerial action.
Just another passive investigation.

As we’ve said before:
If three women had been killed by a stranger, there would be a public emergency.
So why is it different when it’s their partner?

What Real Safety Looks Like

At Battered Women’s Support Services, we are not waiting.
We are building public safety frameworks that are #DesignedWithSurvivors—because survivors already know what safety requires.

Through our initiative, we are:

• Coordinating with municipalities, public health, real estate, housing, and anti-violence organizations to strengthen local intervention
• Training first responders to recognize patterns, not just incidents
•  Building prevention initiatives to roll out this Fall
• Supporting survivors through court systems that too often retraumatize rather than protect
• Advancing a real-time, cross-sector strategy to implement the recommendations from Dr. Kim Stanton’s report

More than 100 organizations and individuals have joined us in building the infrastructure we need—because this work cannot wait for another tragedy.

This Was Preventable and there is no justice in a conviction that leads to a funeral.
There is no safety in a system that looks away when women report, when they testify, when they plead to be believed.

And there is no excuse for inaction when the warning signs are this clear.

Bailey McCourt deserved a system that worked.

She didn’t get it.

If Three Women Had Been Killed by a Stranger, There’d Be a Public Emergency

She Was Killed. But the System’s Response Wasn’t Built for Her.

Another woman is dead in British Columbia.

On July 7, RCMP responded to a domestic violence call in Surrey. Inside the home, a woman was found murdered. Her partner was shot and killed by police. Homicide detectives are now investigating her death. The Independent Investigations Office (IIO) is reviewing the police shooting.

And yet, in three official press releases—issued by the RCMP, IHIT and IIO—there is no mention of femicide. No use of the words gender-based violence or violence against women. No recognition that this was an intimate partner killing.

This is the third woman killed in British Columbia in less than a week in the context of intimate partner violence.

Bailey McCourt, murdered in Kelowna.

An unnamed woman, killed in Abbotsford in a suspected murder-suicide.

And now, another woman murdered during a domestic violence call in Surrey.

If these deaths had occurred in public, at random, or at the hands of strangers, the response would look very different. There would be province-wide coordination. Press briefings. Emergency plans. Urgent statements from leadership.

But when the perpetrator is a partner, a boyfriend, or a husband, the urgency fades. The language softens. And the woman’s life is quietly folded into a passive investigation—her story obscured by procedural tone and sanitized phrases.

This violence is not a mystery, and it doesn’t happen in isolation—it follows a pattern we’ve seen before, and too often, we ignore.

Forty-eight percent of women and girls in British Columbia have experienced intimate partner violence. That’s not a crisis. That’s a collapse.

In January 2025, Premier David Eby declared gender-based violence a national epidemic. He directed ministries to act urgently and in coordination, to reflect the interests and realities of survivors, and to ensure the justice system responds to the needs of those fleeing violence. 

The Attorney General holds Dr. Kim Stanton’s report, which outlines clear, actionable steps that could have prevented deaths like these. The Gender Equity Office leads the Safe and Supported Action Plan, but with no cross-ministerial enforcement or oversight. Public Safety mandate doesn’t prioritize gender-based violence or violence against women at all.

No one appears responsible for coordinating action. While government waits for alignment, women are being murdered.

But declarations without structure are just headlines.

And while the government has the tools—like Dr. Kim Stanton’s report, which lays out clear, survivor-informed recommendations—implementation is uncertain.

There is no standardized lethality risk assessment in criminal or family law.
There is no cross-ministerial mechanism to track or prevent femicide.
And there is no provincial fatality review process to learn from women’s deaths—so the same patterns keep repeating.

BWSS is not waiting.

Through our #DesignedWithSurvivors initiative, we are creating a real-time, community-rooted framework for public safety: one that centres survivors, trains first responders, supports court navigation, and strengthens cross-sector collaboration. We are doing the work now—because every day without action is another risk. More than 100 organizations and individuals across B.C. have joined us. Because violence doesn’t end with a disclosure. It ends when the systems around her stop deferring action.

We urge media, government, and oversight bodies to stop describing these deaths in neutral terms and start confronting what they reveal: a system that recognizes violence too late and responds too little.

Femicide is not an anomaly. It is a measurable, preventable consequence of policy inaction and fragmented systems.

This moment calls for more than reflection. It demands a shift in power, practice, and political will. If gender-based violence is the emergency we say it is, then every institution must behave accordingly—by changing how it intervenes, how it invests, and who it listens to.

Women are not dying from lack of awareness. They are dying in the absence of infrastructure that knows how to protect them. The failure is not personal. It is structural.

Let this not be another week of mourning. Let it be a rupture in the status quo. A moment when we finally decide to build what has never fully existed: a safety net designed for her to survive.

To join #DesignedWithSurvivors email us at endingviolence@bwss.org