Expecting and abused

Already a mother of six, Jenilee Sides, 31, was pregnant with another child when she was shot and killed by her husband, Justin, outside the family’s home in Dairyville last August. As the Tehama County Sheriff’s Department reported to local media, deputies arrived at the home and then found Justin dead from a gunshot wound in a nearby field, apparently having turned the gun on himself.

One detail of the murder-suicide is telling: Justin shot his wife in the stomach.

Violence against pregnant women is more common than most people might think. An expectant mother’s risk of physical harm at the hands of an intimate partner increases as her belly grows, and “reproductive areas” of her body are often targeted by abusers, said Tracy Weeber, director of Enloe Medical Center’s Nettleton Mother & Baby Care Center. That’s at least partially because pregnancies aren’t always planned or welcomed.

“It can be a good thing in people’s lives, but it isn’t always,” Weeber said. “You have financial stress and relationship stress that really puts a strain on whatever relationship you have.”

It’s also possible that a partner becomes jealous that the mother’s attention has turned to her unborn baby, said Melody Proebstel, education and outreach program coordinator for Catalyst Domestic Violence Services.

“The pregnant woman is paying more attention to her body and taking better care of herself because she’s trying to protect the baby,” she said. “That can seem threatening to the abusive partner because they don’t have as much control.”

Including the Sides murder, five women in communities from Redding to Oroville have been killed by their partners in the past two years. (Mary Abby Tucker of Oroville was in the first trimester of pregnancy when her boyfriend, Olabaku Norman Jones, beat her to death in 2013.) Proebstel cautioned against linking the murders to an overarching trend of severe domestic violence in the North State, but she acknowledged that the circumstances are unusual.

“We anticipate one domestic violence death every 18 months,” she said. “So, having five deaths in 24 months is pretty extreme. It’s not normal, but it does help to propel the discussion locally.”

As part of national Domestic Violence Awareness Month this October, Catalyst is honoring those five women with the help of a few local restaurants, each of which has agreed to reserve five visible table-settings for an evening during an event called A Place at the Table.

“By symbolically saving them a place at the table, we’re remembering that their deaths were tragic, but they were more than victims of domestic violence,” Proebstel said. “They lived full lives and had jobs and children and families.”

It’s rare for a severely battered woman to seek care at the Mother & Baby Care Center, Weeber says, but that’s not necessarily reflective of the level of abuse in the community.

“Usually, those women either won’t seek care or their partner won’t allow them to get care when there’s evidence of abuse,” she said. “So, they might not even show up on our doorstep unless they feel they can confide in us and feel safe, or it’s so severe that it’s life-threatening.”

When a patient—pregnant or not—does show signs of abuse, Weeber’s staff follows a set of procedures required by California law, including identifying victims; documenting related injuries; referring victims to crisis intervention services; and reporting to law enforcement.

“We’re mandated to ask: “Are you experiencing any violence, or are you in fear?” Weeber said. “It may not be violence; it could be verbal. And a lot of women say the verbal abuse is more damaging than the violence, because it’s so consistently hammering at their self-worth.”

Connecting an abused mother with intervention services, such as those offered by Catalyst, usually isn’t straightforward, Weeber explained. For instance, a woman going into labor is usually accompanied by her family—including her abusive husband or boyfriend. An obvious sign of intimate partner violence is when he won’t let her answer questions.

If she does talk about being abused, nurses will enlist the assistance of one of Enloe’s medical social workers to become the mandated reporter, and police generally come to the hospital to investigate, Weeber said.

After making sure the woman gets proper physical and psychological treatment, Weeber’s staff will call Catalyst.

“We can have them come to the hospital if it’s a pretty bad case,” she said. “They’ll figure out if she’s in a safe situation and whether she plans to leave her partner or not. Many women aren’t interested, initially, in leaving. They may not have the resources to support themselves, especially if they’re pregnant, or they may have other children in the home. For them to leave would mean leaving their children.

“We try to meet them at the need they have.”

Compared with severe violence, though, a far more common form of domestic abuse is “reproductive coercion,” Weeber said