Op-Ed from ED Rebecca Austin: The truth is clear: Domestic abuse is a matter of community safety

June 26, 2024

Safe Voices Executive Director Rebecca Austin for the Sun Journal — Read full story here

We share in the anger expressed by local and state law enforcement about the events that took place June 15 when Leein Hinkley, a known domestic violence offender, terrorized our community, harmed a woman simply trying to live her life free of abuse, and caused the death of a community member.

This case is a microcosm of monumental issues facing our state. A shortage of public defenders interferes with citizens’ constitutional right to a speedy trial, but releasing violent offenders who have already reoffended, and are likely to do so again, puts survivors of domestic abuse, and our communities at large, in extreme danger.

Too often, our community sees violence against women as isolated incidents that are private in nature. In fact, data shows that domestic violence is a profound indicator of risks to the broader community.

In an issue where our communities have first-hand, tragic, and still fresh-in-our-minds experience, nearly 70% of mass shooters have a history of domestic abuse. In fact, 20% of victims in cases of intimate partner homicides were not the intimate partners themselves, but family members, friends, neighbors, or persons who intervened, including law enforcement.

In the last decade, 9% of law enforcement officers who were killed in the line of duty were killed while responding to domestic violence reports. In decades prior, that number has been as high as 22%.

Rather than being isolated incidents, or “crimes of passion,” severe domestic violence is one end of a spectrum of abuse that has been continuing, and escalating, over time. And far from being a private matter, domestic abuse is, in some ways, rehearsal for wider violence. Committed in the home, with people — women and children — who are socially expected to endure it, this behavior escalates over time with the people in the home, and all too often escalates to move outside the home and into our communities, as it did in Auburn this month.

These tensions are untenable. The situation we saw this month is the natural result of austerity measures that remove vital funding from areas that, far from being safety nets for a small contingent of individuals, are in fact protective measures for all of us.

Workers in the domestic violence intervention and prevention field know all too well about the shortage of resources to address these issues. Funding for your local domestic violence resource center, like Safe Voices, is continually under threat and increasingly reliant on private donations. Mental health resources for survivors who must process PTSD and trauma, or for abusers who have co-occurring mental health issues alongside their decision to use abuse, are critically low in Maine.

And the lack of public defenders to represent offenders means that judges are under immense pressure to release offenders under their constitutionally guaranteed right to a speedy trial or hold them indefinitely, possibly in violation of that right, in order to keep survivors, law enforcement, and the community safe.

These tensions are untenable. The situation we saw this month is the natural result of austerity measures that remove vital funding from areas that, far from being safety nets for a small contingent of individuals, are in fact protective measures for all of us.

Leein Hinkley should not have been released. That is true. Law enforcement and the affected neighborhood should not have been put in such grave danger. That is true. The abuse survivor should have been protected by our system. That is true. And Judge Sarah Churchill should never have had to weigh individual and public safety against rights enshrined in our Constitution. All of these things are true.

And when we hold them all as vital truths but fail to bolster those truths with the funding necessary to achieve them all, that is a failing of all of us, not just one.