Thorough investigation must take place when victims of domestic violence die by suicide: new research

Family violence abusers are increasingly being linked to the suicides of their partners, and in some cases they should face charges if their behaviour drives their partner to kill themselves, according to new research from Melbourne Law School.

Professor Heather Douglas says, “We know that women who have experienced domestic and family violence (DFV) are three times more likely to have attempted suicide than women who have not been abused; in NSW, in 49% of female suicides investigated by coroners there is a recorded or apparent history of DFV.

“A judge in one UK case found the man had contributed to his partner’s death because of his longstanding abuse and control; the judge said he ‘beat her and ground her down and broke her spirit’.

“These are among several examples of UK cases where the apparent suicide was properly investigated, and a partner was found guilty of contributing to the death. But in Australia, there are suspicious cases where investigations that have not looked at these factors. The risk is that once police and other investigators decide it is a suicide, it is as if they vacate the field.”

Professor Douglas’s paper Suicides and Claimed Suicides in the context of Domestic and Family Violence and Coercive Control: Legal and Policy Responses is published in the the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy.

The second issue is that such cases may be hard to prosecute in court because in some states the law has yet to catch up, she says. “Here in Australia, some states and territories have a criminal offence of ‘coercive control’, and that could be used to prosecute abusers whose long pattern of overwhelming abuse has resulted in their partner killing themselves.

“In cases where an abuser taunted his partner and told her to kill herself – by telling her to ‘do everyone a favour’, for example – he could be charged with an offence called ‘counselling suicide’. But in some cases a more accurate and effective charge could be manslaughter, which has a higher penalty and which does not require that the prosecution prove the accused intended the victim to die, which is often difficult to do.”

Professor Douglas also researched cases where perpetrators were found to have staged a partner’s murder as suicide, or claimed that their death was a mercy killing.

Professor Douglas says other researchers have identified clues to a suspicious family violence death: the victim died prematurely; it looked like an accident or suicide; one partner wanted to end the relationship; there was a history of family violence, coercive control or strangulation; the victim was found dead at home by their partner; the partner was the last person to see the victim alive.

“These are red flags that should alert police that a case warrants further investigation,” she says. “One study found that more than half of homicides staged to look like suicides (56%) involved people who were intimate partners.”

Professor Douglas says Australia could look to countries that had passed specific laws to ensure that family-violence suicides were investigated: in California, Joanna’s Law mandates police to investigate such deaths.