The Period After Leaving

What Ohio’s New Fatality Report Reveals

The Ohio Domestic Violence Network (ODVN) released its annual fatality count last week, and the number is 134. That's how many people died in domestic violence related deaths in Ohio between July 2025 and June 2026, counting both victims and the 45 perpetrators among them. It's the second-highest total the network has recorded in the past decade. It is also, in a strange way, described as an improvement: the figure fell about 15 percent from the previous year, which itself had been a 37 percent surge.

One detail in ODVN's count deserves particular attention. In nearly half of the cases reviewed, the victim was in the process of ending the relationship or had already ended it. More than half of the perpetrators had a prior criminal history. These are not new findings. Advocates have said for years that leaving is frequently the most dangerous point in an abusive relationship, not the safest one. What is useful about seeing it stated plainly, in a state level count released as two related bills move through the Ohio legislature (House Bill 566, which would set mandatory standards of care for medical providers when domestic violence is suspected, and Senate Bill 225, which would expand eligibility for the state's address confidentiality program), is that it reframes a question professionals in this field are asked constantly: why didn't she just leave. Shannon Hiott, whose case is described in the report, did leave. She was stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend in Columbus in 2023 anyway. Her sister, Lana Hiott, speaking to an audience of advocates gathered in the Ohio Statehouse atrium, said, "And she was still murdered." She added that women deserve to leave without being punished for it.

What the Ohio count cannot show, because it only counts the dead, is what happens to the much larger group of people who leave and survive. For some of them, especially those with children, research on post-separation abuse argues the relationship does not end so much as change venue. It moves into family court.

This is the argument at the center of a 2025 paper by independent researcher Mairead McCormack, published in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law and drawing on case material from the UK, Ireland, Australia, and the United States. McCormack argues that some abusive fathers, once a relationship ends, shift from direct control to control exercised through repeated litigation: filing motion after motion, contesting custody and parenting time indefinitely, using the cost and exhaustion of the legal process itself as leverage, and in some cases raising parental alienation claims against the parent, usually the mother, who reported the abuse.

McCormack's central claim is that family courts frequently misread mothers' protective actions as "implacable hostility" toward the father, rather than as a reasonable response to documented abuse. She proposes that courts and evaluators use frameworks like the Duluth Post-Separation Power and Control Wheel, together with structured, pattern based risk assessment backed by mandatory training, to distinguish a parent's legitimate protective behavior from the conflict dynamics family court is built to referee.

It is worth being precise about what this paper is and is not. McCormack writes from an explicitly advocacy oriented position, and her sample is case material rather than a population level outcome study, so her argument should be read as a documented pattern and a proposed framework, not as a verified statistic about how common this dynamic is. That caveat does not make the underlying concept any less useful to professionals who sit across from it regularly. A judge evaluating a parent who refuses to agree to unsupervised visitation, or an attorney preparing a client for a custody hearing, or a therapist treating a survivor who describes feeling "back in it" two years after the relationship ended, is looking at the same pattern McCormack describes: control that has changed venue rather than ended.

Putting the Ohio numbers and the McCormack framework side by side suggests a narrower, more useful question than "why didn't she leave." The data says leaving is often the most dangerous moment. The research says that for those who survive it, the danger does not necessarily resolve into safety; for some, it resolves into a different legal process designed to look neutral but structured in a way that can still be used as a weapon. Recognizing that pattern in a filing, a hearing, or a client's account is not the same as resolving it, and this piece does not propose how courts should change their procedures. But naming the pattern accurately is the first thing any of these professions can do with it: it is the difference between seeing a parent as uncooperative and seeing a case as still active, just conducted on different terms.

For the families behind both the Ohio report and the family court cases McCormack describes, separation was never the end of the story on its own. Sometimes it ends in a courtroom. ODVN's count is a reminder of how often, for some, it does not get that far.

Sources:

Source Article: Ohio saw the second-highest domestic violence fatalities in a decade, WOSU / Ohio Statehouse News Bureau, Sarah Donaldson, October 21, 2026

Supporting Paper: McCormack (2025), "Endless Litigation in Family Court as a Method of Post-Separation Coercive Control," Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 47(2-3), 183-212