Ohio could soon require health care facilities to enact new standards for professionals treating patients who they believe are facing intimate partner violence.
Reps. Dontavius Jarrells (D-Columbus) and Josh Williams (R-Sylvania Twp.) introduced House Bill 566, what they call the Break the Silence Act, on Tuesday.
HB 566 creates new mandatory standards of care in an instance of likely domestic violence. Among them, practitioners would have to conduct private interviews—with both the patient and then with any family or household member with them—and document possible abuse-related injuries to add to the patient’s medical records.
Breaunna Nooks, a survivor of intimate partner violence, said Thursday when she would go to a doctor’s office, her abuser would tag along.
“He was always there, at every single one, and when the nurse quietly asked me, ‘Do you feel safe at home?’ He was sitting right there beside me, watching to see what I would say,” Nooks said during a news conference.
Nooks went to Jarrells with the idea for HB 566 last year.
City of Columbus Attorney Zach Klein, a Democrat, said too many domestic violence cases have come across his desk in his tenure.
“A health care worker may be the victim’s first line of defense and is a catalyst to change their lives for the better,” Klein said Thursday. “We’ve seen far too many times, even with homicides in the city of Columbus, that the perpetrator has very little interaction, if maybe no interaction, with the criminal justice system or with police. And oftentimes, it’s friends, it’s families that see or say, that know information.”
The Ohio Domestic Violence Network (ODVN) is behind the bill.
Domestic violence deaths dramatically surged in Ohio, according to the most recent annual fatality report by ODVN, which recorded a 37% increase year-over-year. More men, 82, than women, 75, died—though most victims were women, and most attackers were men. Thirty-six of the state’s 88 counties were touched by domestic violence deaths, with Franklin and Cuyahoga Counties leading the report.
HB 566 has not yet been assigned its committee.
