Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 76 OCTOBER 2022 I N D E P T H In 2002, the most senior advocate at the Women's Crisis Centerin Newburyport put a yellow sticky note on a client's file that said, "very lethal case." Within six weeks, the woman was dead, murdered by her husband, who also killed himself, orphaning their two daughters. PHOTOGRAPH BY ANTHONY TIEULI Twenty years ago, domestic violence advocates had very little to go on besides intuition when it came to identifying especially lethal cases, says Suzanne Dubus, CEO of what is now the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center. "At that time, that's the only way we knew to identify really dangerous cases," she says. And although they threw everything they could at this particularly lethal case—working with the police and the courts, for instance—there were other things that stood in the way of helping her. "None of us were working together," Dubus says. "We could talk to each other and say, 'Hey, we think so-and-so needs some help,' but we couldn't really talk about case management. We couldn't talk about the details of the case because confidentiality laws had us all running scared, and so we just kind of thought we couldn't do that." After that woman was killed, though, they knew they needed things to change: There were gaps in the system that "allowed offenders to walk through them." "What was going to be different the next time someone came through our doors who was in just as much danger? What are we going to do differently so that we can we change the system so that we'll have a better approach?" Dubus says. Today things are different. Rather than relying on a sixth sense or intuition, the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center developed two assessments for identifying the most high-risk cases: The Domestic Violence High Risk Team (DVHRT) Model and the Danger Assessment for Law Enforcement (DA-LE). The model has proven to be successful. "Since the model was implemented in 2005, in the greater Newburyport area, we've had zero homicides in the past 17 years versus eight in the 10 years before," Dubus says. Now, the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center is spreading that model and tools across the country with the launch of theGeigerInstitute,a national initiative to end domestic violence homicides. The Geiger Institute aims to partner with communities around the country, including law enforcement, domestic violence advocacy organizations, and prosecutors, to offer its violence assessment tools and resources, along with training and technical assistance. "We are going into different communities, we're training them on the research about dangerous domestic violence cases, and we're helping them to identify the risk factors that are in place before a woman is killed so that we can better predict and identify who those women are," Dubus says, adding that she says A new national institute from the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center in Newbur y por t aims to end domestic v iolence homicide around the countr y. BY ALEX ANDRA PECCI GREAT PROTECTORS Suzanne Dubus, is the CEO of the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center.