Priscilla Bennett

When we think of mass shootings, we likely picture an armed unknown assailant in a mall, theater, school, or even a house of worship. Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control organization, found 54 percent of mass shooting incidents — those in which four or more people are killed — involved the murder of a current or former partner or family member. Children made up more than 40 percent of fatalities in mass shootings connected to domestic and family volence. There’s also an emerging pattern that men who commit mass shootings have histories as domestic abusers.

Domestic violence has turned the home front into a battlefield bloodier than those in wars. Between October 2001 and June 2012, nearly 6,500 American troops were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq; during that same period, more than 11,700 women died in acts of domestic violence, according to the National Network to End Domestic Violence. Children are far more likely to die in their homes than in school shootings.

As with every other pressing social issue, this situation will probably deteriorate further under the Trump administration. Already, published reports say some women who are undocumented aren’t pursuing protective orders against abusive partners, fearing they’ll be arrested by federal agents lurking outside of courthouses. Immigration advocates maintain that abusers also use threats of deportation to deter their victims from leaving or seeking help.

As an Alabama senator, Jeff Sessions voted against renewal of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013 when it expanded protections to undocumented immigrants, the LGBT community, and indigenous women on tribal lands. It easily passed, but now Sessions, as attorney general, oversees a law that he once said was not “sound.” With President Trump’s proposed cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Justice Department, both of which support anti-domestic-violence programs, some fear the safety of women will be even more compromised by a presidency that already seems hostile toward them.

Today domestic violence will claim three more women. Outside of their families and immediate communities, few will hear anything about their murders. If not for the crime’s location, Karen Smith would have died in relative obscurity, too. We can no longer behave as if murder is a terrible price a woman must pay if she can’t leave an abusive relationship or seeks security for her children. Their deaths deserve more than the indignity of our silence. With each life senselessly lost, that silence is complicity.

Renée Graham can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @reneeygraham.