Dozens of Calgarians gathered at city hall on Saturday to speak out against domestic violence and the need to protect people harmed by their partners. The event happened exactly a week after the shooting death of 23-year-old Madisson Cobb. Cobb’s ex-boyfriend, Devon Bradley Malik, is now charged with first-degree murder. The woman had a restraining order against her former partner at the time of her death and the man was already facing criminal harassment charges. “Unfortunately it is the same recurring theme of ‘she did everything that she can. She had a restraining order, but she was still killed.’ And that’s a common theme,” said Racha El-Dib, whose sister Nadia was killed by an ex-boyfriend in Calgary in 2018. El-Dib has since founded Nadia’s Hope Foundation, a registered charity focused on bringing awareness to domestic abuse and violence. “It ended up being a case of ‘if I can’t have you, nobody else can,’ so he took her life in a very, very violent way,” El-Dib explained. “We decided to start Nadia’s foundation to remember Nadia. Not just for, unfortunately, the way that she was killed, but also who she was as a person, because she’s so much more than that last 40 minutes of her life.” Saturday’s Voices Against Domestic Violence rally was organized in part by Marigold Mioc. “Because if these (crimes) are still happening, there’s still need for discussion about these things. These women need to be remembered. These women need to be talked about because their stories have meaning. Their stories have value,” said Mioc. According to Statistics Canada, 44 per cent of women in Canada reported experiencing some type of physical, sexual or psychological abuse from a partner. “Intimate partner violence, a lot of the time it can go unseen. But also a lot of the time it is seen in contexts where it’s kind of normalized or kind of brushed to the side or glossed over. We need to make sure that we teach people and educate ourselves on the signs of intimate partner violence,” Mioc added.
