Survivors of Domestic Violence Share Inadequacies of the Legal System

Trigger warning: Description of family violence

Generally domestic violence does not become a media story until someone has died because of it — such as a recent shooting in Louisiana of eight children, killed at the hands of a man who was father to most of them. Yet domestic violence does not simply happen one day when someone “snaps.” There are warning signs and predictable triggers that advocates have been talking about for decades — yet there has not been a great deal of community will to do something to prevent these homicides and day-to-day abuses from happening.

As one way to try to get community attention, and discussions about solutions, Battered Women’s Justice Project (BWJP) created a short documentary, “Preventable,” profiling the cases of two women as a prelude to conversation. The documentary was screened, followed by a panel discussion, on April 15 at Capri Theater in Minneapolis.

One of the principal voices in the documentary is Amanda, who woke one morning to find her ex-husband — whose gun had been returned to him from a divorce judge, despite concerns raised about his violence and stability — had killed their three children and her boyfriend. He told her his intention was to let her live with the deep loss and then he killed himself.

In the film, she described the indelible images of that morning. “I see my son Drake, laying there like he’s just taking a nap. I look at my daughter Caydence, laying on the couch like she’s been cowering because she’s scared, and my son Odin in the fetal position.”

One of the points of the film is that it doesn’t take much effort to protect children, to keep people safe, by making it harder to own a firearm for people who are prone to instability.

Amanda has a tattoo that includes her three children now gone, as well as two children she is now parenting, with their favorite colors — partly because she would never have a picture of them together. (photo by Mikki Morrissette)

Amanda says she moves forward, sharing the story, to honor them. She wants to remind people that the court system did not take the threat of her ex-husband seriously.

As a survivor put it, the signs were there: “I had a cigarette burn in the middle of my forehead. I had bruises on my neck, bruises on my face, and my lip was busted.”

Stephanie, another woman in the film, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing her abuser — and was not allowed to leave her state for the Minnesota discussion because she is still under parole after serving 19 years. “You’re not judged by the truth of your story,” she says. “A lot of women’s voices are not getting heard. If they were, maybe we could start to create laws to help us and raise awareness that domestic violence is real. We still face the challenge [that so many don’t even] believe the story of survivors.”

How the Legal System Fails Survivors

Panelist Jennifer Becker, director of BWJP’s National Center on Gun Violence in Relationships, says firearm ownership is the highest risk for homicide in intimate partner violence. “We actually have laws that can effectively mitigate this risk. So this isn’t necessarily an issue where we just need to pass more laws,” she says. “We have some that can be really effective, but what we see consistently is a lack of implementation, a lack of will to implement, a lack of consistency in doing so. We spend a lot of our time educating for change.”

Becker added that data can give people insights, but the personal stories of what people live through is what people need to hear to be part of change. “People who aren’t forced to live that every day want to look away. It’s difficult,” she says. “I feel like we have a responsibility to make people look directly at it, not for the sake of hearing a dramatic story, but to open the conversation about how we can avoid it happening ever again.”

The isolation factor for survivors was also brought up — how even taking a violent partner’s gun to police and talking about their fear can still lead to having the gun returned to the abuser.

As Stephanie says, “The system failed me. I told them that I feared for me and my kid’s life. After they returned the gun to him, it made me feel even more hopeless, because I feel at that point they were giving him the okay.”

Panelists included survivor Amanda and BWJP’s Jennifer Becker and Cindene Pezzell. (photo by Mikki Morrissette)

Cindene Pezzell is director of BWJP’s National Defense Center for Criminalized Survivors. She says, “All of the survivors we work with eventually talk about being a survivor of both intimate partner violence and of the criminal legal system. From the moment a survivor gets involved in systems, they’re going to find themselves in a position where the barriers are almost insurmountable — including when police arrive at a domestic violence incident deciding who gets charged. That’s a huge challenge for survivors. After they’re arrested, the court doesn’t seem to be asking ‘what happened’ or ‘why did you do what you did?’ It’s asking questions that don’t help, like ‘why didn’t you just leave?’”

Pezzell adds, “The laws simply aren’t written to accommodate violence that happens in intimate partner relationships. They’re written for a fight that occurs on the street. What a survivor knew about her own situation and her appraisal of the danger she was in — those things are often lost as they go through the criminal legal system. There’s just a profound failure of court systems to understand severity.

“Our jails and prisons around the country are full of folks like Stephanie who are there because sometimes defending your life is considered to be against the law. … Telling people to protect themselves from violence by having a gun is not something that’s going to work out.”

Amanda notes that during divorce proceedings, her ex-husband’s family gave him money to fight for custody. She had no money. “I felt like what I had to say meant nothing. He ended up getting custody, even though he had no job. He was at home and living with his parents while I was holding two jobs to have a place for my kids to stay. Because I didn’t have money, I was thrown to the side.”

Not only are a majority of domestic violence survivors not represented because of a lack of resources, panelists said, but there is a pervasive belief in family court that if a woman comes forward with allegations of abuse, she is not being truthful.

Cheryl Thomas moderated the panel discussion (photo by Mikki Morrissette)

Suggestions from the panel:

• Family law attorneys need to ask if there are firearms in the home.
• Judges and attorneys need to understand more about domestic violence dynamics.
• Children’s mental and physical health need to be centered in discussions
• Isolation and control can distort what domestic violence is — sometimes even survivors need to understand that it doesn’t require physical violence
• Trauma doesn’t end when people enter the system; survivors can become even more invisible in the criminal legal system
• It is not automatic that a victims sees herself as a survivor; self-love has to come first

BWJP has developed SAFeR worksheets to assess risks — a framework for evaluating custody cases when domestic violence is present and going deeper to understand what is happening in the home and how it is affecting children.

Minnesota Women’s Press is hosting online Talk & Do conversations to get from stories to solutions to collective action steps led by community members. One of the options are discussions related to addressing gender-based violence, based on interest. Sign up here.

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From The Trace, April 24, 2026

The shootings in Louisiana and Virginia are among 156 gun-related murder-suicides so far this year, according to a Trace analysis of data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. That’s an average of around one and a half murder-suicides per day. The shootings have resulted in the deaths of 200 victims and 153 perpetrators. Of the victims, 145 were female, and 146 of the perpetrators were male.

Murder-suicide doesn’t get as much attention as mass shootings, even though it happens more frequently. Last year, there were 407 mass shootings in the United States, making them a daily phenomenon. But there were 681 murder-suicides — nearly two per day, on average.

Like the Louisiana and Virginia murder-suicides, most of these incidents involve domestic violence. And nearly all of them are perpetrated with guns.

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