Sexual Abuse & Domestic Violence

Alaska has the highest homicide rate in the nation for women killed by men — for the seventh year in a row.

The state has been first or second on that list for a decade. That’s according to a report released Tuesday from the Violence Policy Center, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that advocates for gun control.

The report details findings from the most recent data, which is from 2020. In that year, 12 Alaska women were killed by men. More than 90% of the victims were killed by someone they knew. A quarter of them were killed with guns.

The report says state lawmakers should prioritize ending the “epidemic of deadly violence” against Alaska women — and particularly Alaska Native women. 

Women in Alaska were killed at more than twice the national average rate. That’s 3.43 women were killed by men for every 100,000 people. Alaska Native women were killed by men at ten times the rate white women in Alaska were. 

The federal Office of Violence Against Women is holding its annual Government to Government Tribal Consultation meetings in Anchorage this week. Its aims are to figure out how to administer tribal funds to make Indigenous women safer and to strengthen the federal response to these violent crimes.

LGBTQ people experience domestic and sexual violence at higher rates than heterosexual and cisgender people. On top of that, queer people of color, people with disabilities and bisexual and transgender people are more likely to experience violence of any kind in their lives. 

One key difference is that they are less likely to recognize it as abuse. 

“It doesn’t fit the stereotypical image of a cis-man physically abusing a cis-woman, which is often in people’s perception of what domestic violence looks like,” said Meryl Connelly-Chew from Juneau’s domestic violence support organization, AWARE.

That’s why AWARE is hosting Spectrum – the only queer-specific support group that serves people in Juneau who’ve experienced trauma. 

Connelly-Chew says the group discussion focuses on the effects of trauma – not the traumatic experiences themselves. 

“[We] do this because we’re queer people who have experienced, you know, various traumas in our own lives,” Connelly-Chew said. “I think it’s what makes it work so well.” 

“We’re kind of discussing it together and learning with people and learning from people in a way that isn’t necessarily giving advice, but it’s just sharing our different lived experiences, and what that’s been like being in this community,” said Chloey Cavanaugh, the other facilitator of the group. 

Connelly-Chew said some of the most common hang-ups new group members have are about belonging. 

“I often get asked like, ‘am I queer enough for this queer space? Is my trauma, like, bad enough for this trauma support group?’,” they said. “I get asked that, almost, from everyone who calls.”

Cavanaugh says Spectrum prioritizes confidentiality and safety because Juneau is a small city. 

“You’re going into a space where we’re all committed to confidentiality, and uplifting each other, and you know who’s gonna be there,” she said. 

Spectrum is a free, in-person program that lasts 12 weeks, starting Sept. 29. 

For more information, call 907-586-4902 or email Connelly-Chew at merylc@awareak.org.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed a package of public safety-related bills into law Thursday, including a measure that updates Alaska’s definition of sexual assault.

The change had been sought for years by victims’ advocates and allows the state to prosecute someone for sexual assault, even if the victim freezes and doesn’t verbally say “no.” Pre-existing law said only that an assault took place without consent if someone was threatened by force.

Victim advocate Lisa Ellanna of Nome said the change was long overdue and “one of the most important steps the state of Alaska has taken” to protect victims.

Originally authored by Rep. Geran Tarr, D-Anchorage, the change was inserted into House Bill 325, by Rep. Sara Rasmussen, R-Anchorage, on the last day of this year’s legislative session.

Other parts of HB 325, crafted by Rasmussen, expand the definition of domestic abuse to cover situations where an abuser involuntarily shares an explicit picture of a victim.

Rasmussen said the bill “really did become a team effort.”

“I think the stars aligned perfectly for this one, and I think we’ll have a better state moving forward because of it,” she said.

Thursday’s signing ceremony took place at the state crime lab in Anchorage, where Dunleavy also signed two other bills into law.

Senate Bill 7, from Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, D-Anchorage, requires the Alaska Department of Public Safety to publish policies and procedures related to police conduct.

The department already publishes these procedures, but Gray-Jackson said that putting the requirement into law ensures that the policies remain available, even with a change in administration.

House Bill 106, introduced by the governor’s office, fulfills a federal requirement that the state submit missing-person reports involving people under 21 to the National Crime Information Center no more than two hours after that person has been reported missing.

Pre-existing state law allowed 24 hours, and only required reporting for children under 18.

Two Alaska families who lost custody of their infants after what they say were flawed diagnoses of abuse by the state’s embattled former top child abuse physician are suing Dr. Barbara Knox, her former supervisor and Providence Alaska Medical Center in federal court.

The lawsuit, filed July 8, is the latest development in Knox’s brief but calamitous tenure as the head of Alaska Cares, a state-supported multidisciplinary clinic operated by Providence Alaska Medical Center that handles reports of child abuse across the state.

Providence Alaska Medical Center has not filed a response to the complaint in court.

The hospital is “unable to provide information on pending litigation. Additionally, under state and federal patient privacy laws and out of respect for our patients and family members, Providence cannot discuss specifics regarding patient care,” spokesman Mikal Canfield said Wednesday.

Knox did not immediately respond to an email asking for comment.

Knox, a nationally known child abuse physician, became medical director of Alaska Cares in fall 2019. She had recently been put on leave from a position at the University of Wisconsin as the medical school investigated allegations of bullying and misdiagnoses.

During her time at Alaska Cares, staff and families soon reported similar complaints of aggressive behavior and misdiagnoses. By fall of 2021, the entire medical staff of the clinic had resigned and Providence said it was investigating the workplace environment of Alaska Cares.

At the same time, Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit investigative newsroom, found a dozen instances in which Knox’s diagnoses of child abuse were rejected by officials in court, child welfare workers and other medical professionals.

In January, Knox announced that she would resign days after the Daily News and Wisconsin Watch published a story about Emily and Justin Acker, a Fairbanks-area military family who said Knox wrongly diagnosed their newborn daughter’s brain injury as abuse, leading them to lose custody for nearly a year.

Emily and Justin Acker are among the plaintiffs of the federal lawsuit filed last week. The second family is a Sitka couple, named as John and Jane Doe in the complaint, who lost custody of their infant son after an abuse diagnosis by Knox.

Both families say injuries attributed to child abuse by Knox were actually the result of difficult pregnancies and traumatic births.

Knox conducted “inappropriate, incomplete and deeply flawed” examinations of the two infants named in the case, and a review of the doctor’s work “determined that some of her child abuse diagnoses failed to meet the standard of care,” the complaint alleges.

The Ackers’ daughter and son were in state custody for 11 months.

In a statement, Emily and Justin Acker said they were “deeply hurt” by their experience at Providence Hospital.

“We trusted them to protect and care for our daughter during a very difficult time, but instead, they allowed our family to be torn apart by the opinion of a doctor, who, quite honestly, has no business practicing medicine anymore. They chose to ignore her very disturbing history as a child abuse pediatrician and put us through unimaginable pain,” the couple wrote. “Their actions caused a domino effect of grief and trauma, not only for us but especially for our children.”

“We have suffered every day since this nightmare began,” the statement continued. “I mean yes, it would be very nice for us to win this case, but nothing will ever replace the times and memories that we lost with our children during that time, and that’s the part of this whole situation that hurts us the most. They could never give us back the joy that they took from us, and that’s the biggest reason why we chose to pursue this lawsuit.”

The Sitka family’s two children were out of their custody for more than five months, and both parents faced felony assault charges. Those criminal charges appear to have been dismissed or are otherwise not visible in state court records.

The plaintiffs’ attorney is Mike Kramer, a Fairbanks lawyer who specializes in litigation against government agencies.

The complaint alleges that Alaska Cares knew Knox did not report a “pattern of misdiagnoses” to the Alaska Medical Board. It also alleges that the hospital system has reached “settlements” and “secured nondisclosure agreements” with former staff members who quit because of Knox. And it asserts that Alaska Cares reviewed Knox’s work and “determined that some of her child abuse diagnoses failed to meet the standard of care.”

The lawsuit also named Bryant Skinner, Knox’s former supervisor at Providence, as a defendant, saying he negligently supervised her and failed to act on dozens of complaints about her behavior.

Providence Alaska Medical Center has not released information about the workplace investigation into Knox, and doesn’t comment on patient care allegations.

After leaving Alaska this spring, Knox was hired as a professor of pediatrics by the University of Florida in Jacksonville.

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

Congress soon may pass its most significant gun legislation in three decades. Senators are working to fast-track a bipartisan gun safety bill that negotiators recently finalized, spurred by mass shootings last month in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.

The Senate, which advanced the bill in a 64-34 vote on Tuesday, will hold a procedural vote on Thursday to end debate and prevent a filibuster from blocking the bill.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is expected to clear that vote and head for final passage in the Senate by the weekend, just ahead of lawmakers’ July recess. It would then go to the House for expected passage, at which point President Biden — who has urged Congress to move without delay — has said he would sign it.

The bill’s measures are narrowly focused, with lawmakers aiming to craft legislation that would earn a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the evenly-divided Senate. That means it falls short of many of the changes that Democrats long have been pushed for, including universal background checks and a ban on military-style semiautomatic rifles.

Still, Democrats and gun safety advocates are hailing the legislation as an important and incremental step in the right direction. Among other provisions, it would expand background checks for prospective gun buyers between the ages of 18 and 21, incentivize states to create red-flag laws, and give states more funding for school safety and mental health resources.

It also would close the so-called “boyfriend loophole” in a law that prevents people convicted of domestic abuse from owning a gun. That law currently only applies to people who are married to, living with or have a child with the victim.

April Zeoli, a professor of criminal justice and public health at Michigan State University, says those limited categories don’t reflect the fact that people spend a lot more time dating now than they did in the past, with women marrying on average in their late 20s and men in their early 30s.

“Because we spend all this time dating, it doesn’t mean that violence doesn’t happen,” Zeoli told Morning Edition’s A Martínez. “It still happens, but the dating partners right now aren’t covered by the federal restriction.”

More than a thousand women are killed by intimate partners every year in the United States, based on FBI and CDC data, and about half of the intimate partner homicides in the U.S. are perpetrated by an unmarried partner, a 2018 study found.

The bill would close the loophole, but add a caveat

Democrats long have tried to broaden the definition of who qualifies for the ban. Their most recent attempt, an effort to add it to the reauthorization of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act that passed in March, was unsuccessful.

While that effort was on going, some states addressed the boyfriend loophole within their jurisdictions.

Thirty-one states have policies prohibiting convicted domestic abusers from having guns, according to a tracker from Everytown for Gun Safety. Of those, 19 go beyond the federal prohibition to cover abusive dating partners.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is poised to finally make that change on the federal level. It adds and defines the term dating relationship as “a relationship between individuals who have or have recently had a continuing serious relationship of a romantic or intimate nature,” with considerations for the length and nature of the relationship as well as the frequency and type of interactions between the individuals involved.

The bill includes a related provision, allowing people who were convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence to have their gun rights restored if their record stays clean for five years. There are some exceptions for victims’ spouses, parents, guardians or cohabitants.

Zeoli says she’d like to know more about the reasoning behind that provision, as it doesn’t appear to be informed by any research.

“If we’re talking about dating partners versus spouses, both of them can do the same types of violence, both of them can be the same level of dangerous, get the same conviction and get the same firearm restriction,” she said. “But the spouses will have this lifetime firearm restriction, and the dating partners will have this five-year restriction, and I don’t know the logic behind that disparity.”

Baseless fears of deception and retaliation

Why hasn’t the federal law evolved with the times or research data? Zeoli offers one explanation:

“I think that there has always been a fear that women will make things up, that women will try to take revenge on their dating partners through lying about abuse and trying to get these firearm restrictions on them,” she says. “And that fear is unfounded. In fact … a large proportion of people who experience abuse never report it to the courts or law enforcement.”

As a researcher, she says it’s been difficult to watch as measures that data suggest could save lives — such as closing the boyfriend loophole — haven’t been implemented. Zeoli says the bipartisan bill, even with its limited provisions, is a step in the right direction.

“I am encouraged by the fact that we are seeing movement at the federal level on gun safety legislation, when we haven’t seen it for literally decades,” Zeoli says.

The audio for this interview was produced by Jeevika Verma and Ben Abrams, and edited by Raquel Maria Dillon.

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Rep. Geran Tarr, D-Anchorage, is relieved her bill to modernize the definition of consent passed this year. “When I think about a policy like a massive public safety improvement, if we delay action, I know that between now and the next time I or anyone else will have the opportunity to address that, hundreds more Alaskans will be harmed,” she said during a phone interview Thursday.

When a sexual assault is reported, a key element of establishing whether an assault took place is determining if consent was given. Current Alaska law requires the use of force or the threat of force. Simply saying no isn’t enough to establish that consent wasn’t given. Doing nothing at all or freezing — which is a common response to trauma — can be seen as consenting. The law has been like that for the past 40 years. On May 18, the last day of the regular legislative session, the House and Senate voted unanimously to change how sexual assault can be prosecuted by modernizing the definition of consent.

“Alaska took a gargantuan step forward in updating our laws,” said John Skidmore, deputy attorney general for the Criminal Division of the Alaska Department of Law. He spoke during a governor’s press conference Thursday.

Under the bill, consent is defined as “a freely given, reversible agreement specific to the conduct at issue… ‘freely given’ means agreement to cooperate in the act was positively expressed by word or action.” The bill includes a provision for the trauma response of freezing: “lack of consent through words or conduct means there is no consent… lack of consent does not require verbal or physical resistance and may include inaction.”

Another provision of the bill criminalizes rape by fraud, which means “you cannot impersonate a person known to the victim in order to obtain consent,” Skidmore said. It also codifies a reduction in the timeframe for sexual assault kits to be processed to six months; the law currently requires rape kits be processed within a year.

Bipartisan, unanimous support

After more than a dozen committee hearings, Tarr’s bill on consent, House Bill 5, was still in the House Finance Committee on May 17, two days before the end of regular session. So Tarr was “looking for any vehicle possible that was a public safety piece of legislation that we might have been able to insert the language into. [House Bill] 325 was the perfect vehicle,” she said. Tarr coordinated with House Bill 325 sponsor, Anchorage Republican Rep. Sara Rasmussen, “who was amazing and wanted to do everything she could to help get this across the finish line.”

On the last day of regular session, Palmer Republican Sen. Shelley Hughes and Juneau Democratic Sen. Jesse Kiehl worked together and made impassioned arguments for adding Tarr’s House Bill 5 as an amendment to HB 325, which was on the floor.

Hughes said: “57.7% of Alaska women have experienced sexual violence or intimate partner violence, at least in one form or another, in their lifetime. That’s roughly six out of 10 women. That’s three out of five, Mr. President. There are five female legislators in this body, and 13 in the other body; statistically speaking, 10 of us are victims. That is how unsafe our state has become for women and girls.” 

The Senate voted unanimously to pass the amendment and the bill. “There have been moments of ugliness, some ugliness this session, but we also know in this chamber how to work together,” Hughes said. The House voted unanimously to concur with the changes to the bill.

Wait and see

Tarr credits Standing Together Against Rape (STAR) with identifying the outdated consent definition and making it a legislative priority to fix it. STAR, based in Anchorage, is a sexual trauma prevention and response organization.

“We are so pleased and elated that it passed. It was a long time coming,” STAR communications and development director Jennifer Brown said on the phone Friday. Brown hopes passing the bill will “send a message to perpetrators that violating someone who can’t consent or someone who says no – there’s going to be consequences for that now.”

And she hopes it will impact survivors. “We hope that more of our clients will be able to get justice because of the changes in the law,” Brown said. “But we will have to wait and see what happens, if the percentage of prosecutions goes up.”