This Week in Public Safety: Five Women, Five Cities, One Pattern
In the span of just two weeks, five women in British Columbia were killed or critically injured—all by men they knew. These acts of violence took place in different cities, under different circumstances, but they are connected by something deeper than proximity in time. They reveal a pattern: of known risk dismissed, of institutional failure repeated, and of silence where there should have been response.
This video documents that pattern—not to sensationalize individual tragedies, but to confront the routine nature of intimate partner violence – a crisis of gender-based violence in this province and the institutional inaction that continues to allow it. We are often told these are isolated cases, unpredictable and tragic. But they are not isolated, and they are not unpredictable. The risks were visible.
The systems were informed. Women asked for help. The help did not come.
There has been no public emergency declared, no coordinated review announced and for now no meaningful accountability offered. In the absence of action, the silence itself becomes a message—a message about whose lives are valued and whose safety is optional.
This video is part of the #DesignedWithSurvivors initiative, a broader effort to reframe public safety through the lens of those most often ignored when violence occurs. It is a call to remember that what is being tolerated today will be repeated tomorrow—unless that pattern is broken by design.
