‘Not knowing if you’re going to live or die.’ Why strangulation tops Ky domestic violence reports | Opinion
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Last week, Kentucky released its first ever statistical report on domestic violence. The report — as compiled by Kentucky’s Criminal Justice Statistical Analysis Center — details all the reports, charges and arrests made by local and state police on domestic violence charges.
As soon as you start looking at it, one word jumps out: strangulation.
In 2022, there were nearly 1,000 reports for first and second degree strangulation. The numbers are even higher in court charges, which means a domestic violence incident that started with assault might end with felony strangulation charges.
As domestic violence advocates already know, strangulation is both a beginning and end to the issue because it can so easily turn lethal. Taking someone’s breath is the ultimate control. It also causes long-lasting injuries that may not even show, like voice loss or traumatic brain injuries.
“Most of our survivors that we serve have experienced strangulation,” said Darlene Thomas, executive director of Greenhouse 17, Central Kentucky’s domestic violence shelter. “That is the time they realize how awful their situation is. Having someone wrap their hands around your throat, not knowing if you’re going to live and die, is different from being hit.”
A 2008 study found that 99 percent of strangulation victims are women. Non-fatal strangulation is a significant predictor for future violence, and women who’ve survived a strangulation attempt are seven times more likely to be killed later.
But strangulation has only been a felony charge since 2019, when Lexington’s own Sen. Alice Forgy Kerr, filed Senate Bill 70. Kentucky was one of the last five states to pull strangulation out of 4th degree domestic violence assault (minor injury).
The bill sailed through the House and Senate in 2019. Ironically, one of the first high-profile people charged with strangulation had voted for the bill — former Rep. Robert Goforth and gubernatorial candidate was arrested and charged with strangulation and assault for allegedly choking his wife with an Ethernet cable. He later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, and was later convicted on fraud charges related to his pharmacy business.
“It was amazing to me how much of that (strangulation) was happening,” Kerr said. “It’s not just the fact that so many can die this way, but if they don’t die there are lots of lifelong side effects.”
The 4th degree assault charge was inadequate to deal with the seriousness of strangulation, said Kimberly Baird, Fayette’s Commonwealth Attorney.
“People didn’t realize how serious it is,” she said.
The new law means offenders may face much tougher penalties than they used to. Thomas was heartened by the high numbers of both reports and prosecutions of felony strangulation charges.
“That is very promising,” she said. “If you get charged with it, you’re taking someone off the street because they’re is a huge correlation between who is strangled and who is murdered.”
How many homicides?
Another conclusion from the report? It does not answer the main questions that Sen. Whitney Westerfield, R-Crofton, wanted answered when he filed a bill to track domestic violence statistics: to find out how many people were killed in domestic violence incidents every year.
Before then, advocates depended on newspaper clipping services or Google to find out. So Westerfield was a little disappointed to find out that the first ever Kentucky report on domestic violence — released last Friday — did not actually have a number on those fatalities.
“I’d like to get everybody on board with electronic filing because I’d like to still build the homicide part of the data picture,” he said.
What the report does have is court cases involving domestic violence homicides as recorded by the Administrative Office of the Courts from district and circuit courts around the state. Counting those cases, which start in district court, there were roughly 24 cases of attempted murder and 30 murders ruled domestic violence.
It turns out that the requirement for information from the state medical examiner’s office and county coroners was removed from Westerfield’s Senate Bill 271 in 2022 with another bill filed in 2023, House Bill 535, filed by Rep. Stephanie Dietz, R-Edgewood. Justice Cabinet officials said “the Office of the Medical Examiner and the Kentucky Coroners Association advised to remove the requirement because domestic violence as a contributing cause of death does not present in a way that can be determined by a coroner or medical examiner through only an autopsy.”
In other words, domestic violence is a pattern of abuse that cannot always be determined through an autopsy.
“We recognize the importance of tracking domestic violence-related fatalities, and through CJSAC, we have been working with stakeholders toward more complicated reporting, collection and analysis,” said Morgan Hall, Morgan Hall, the Justice Cabinet’s Communications Director.
“We don’t have all the information we need,” Westerfield said, but “I feel great that this is a baseline we can work from.”
Others are also cautiously optimistic.
Like many other agencies, Baird and her attorneys that deal with felony domestic violence are still going through the report. What strikes her and many other advocates is that the numbers are low because so many people still don’t report the problem.
“This is shedding light on the fact we need more services —not only in terms of counseling for victims, but more money for shelters, for financial resources, for all kinds of things to empower victims to think they have the ability to leave,” Baird said.
The report also does a good job in showing policy makers how much children are affected by this problem, from more than 200 charges on child endangerment to the nearly 1,250 children served in domestic violence shelters in 2022 alone.
ZeroV is the new name of the Kentucky Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which coordinates the state’s domestic violence shelters. That agency will make a formal presentation about the report to the General Assembly in November.
“Beyond the data from courts, law enforcement, and state protective services, we must continue to find ways to support survivors who do not reach out to law enforcement or the courts for protection and help and identify the barriers such survivors face,” the ZeroV statement said.
Thomas said the data sometimes raises more questions than it answers, but subsequent reports will probably provide them.
“I’m glad there’s data to even explore, to understand what those numbers mean and how that impacts survivors access to safety,” she said. “This could be a good tool for all systems to learn and grow.”
This story was originally published July 7, 2023 at 9:31 AM.
