The Hon. Gail Gago, South Australia’s minister for the status of women, visited the University of Guelph on Tuesday to discuss domestic violence death review committees with sociology professor Myrna Dawson, who holds a Canada Research Chair in public policy and criminal justice and established a research unit at Guelph dedicated to the social and legal responses to violence in Canada.

As part of her portfolio, Gago chairs the chief executives group responsible for South Australia’s women’s safety strategy. Her meeting with Dawson included Dr. William Lucas, regional supervising coroner and chair of Ontario’s domestic violence death review committee, and Kathy Kerr, executive lead for committee management in the coroner’s office. With Gago were her ministerial advisor Natalie Rutherford and media advisor Lucy Hood.

Dawson is a member of the Ontario domestic violence death review committee and co-author (with University of Western Ontario professor Peter Jaffe) of the discussion paper that served as the foundation upon which the Ontario committee was built. The first of its kind in Canada, the Ontario committee is housed by the chief coroner’s office.

Dawson gave numerous presentations about the work of the Ontario committee while in Australia this past winter as a visiting scholar at the University of Melbourne. Her latest book, Violence Against Women in Canada, was co-authored with Holly Johnson, a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa, and was published by Oxford University Press.