Peace Bonds: Preventive Justice? Or Preventing Justice?

In this comment I wish to examine some of the legal and practical problems with peace bond proceedings under s. 810 of the Criminal Code for women who seek to protect themselves from their abusive partners. Recent research confirms that women are most likely to suffer violence at the hands of men they have known intimately and that they are especially vulnerable at the time of separation. A 1991 study funded by the Ontario Women\u27s Directorate and the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, for example, found that intimate femicides – or the killing of women by their intimate partners – accounted for some 61 percent of all homicides of women where an offender was identified. In sharp contrast, only eight percent of all male victims were killed by their spouses. Women separating or recently estranged from their partners were at the greatest risk, homicide being significantly more likely to occur at this time than at other times during the relationship