All posts by David Lawrence

Violence Against Women

Share

All of my data on the topic came from Stats Canada’s 2013 survey on family and intimate partner violence. I wanted to find is how much of the family violence is spousal as opposed to violence that is directed towards other family members, what percentage of family violence is directed towards women, both as the spouse and other female family members, and how might the rate of intimate partner violence change with different age groups.

I took a chart that had selected police reported instances of family violence from 2009 to 2013. Violations could be directed at spouses or other family members. The chart was not broken down by age so other family members could be children or extended family. The chart also did not separate gender either. Types of violations included violations causing death, attempted murder, physical assault and sexual assault. In total there were 75,185 violations with 37,828 of those being directed at the spouse. Of the violations against spouses 36,877 were cases of physical assault. 49 per cent of all instances of family violence was directed towards the spouse.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2014001/article/14114/tbl/tbl15-eng.htm

To find how much of the violence against spouses is against women I turned to a chart of police reported intimate partner violence by metro from 2013. There were 32 metro areas in the chart with two of them being Toronto and Ottawa. Next I added all incidents to see how many there were in total. There were 60,101 incidents that year with 79 per cent of incidents being directed against women and 24 per cent being towards men. When isolating Ottawa, the percentage of violations increases to 84 per cent compared to other metro areas. This is a rise of 5 per cent above the national average.Men vs Women Breakdown

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2014001/article/14114/tbl/tbl12-eng.htm

Finally I took statistics from victims of police-reported dating violence, by age group and sex of victim in 2010 and victims of police-reported spousal violence, by age group and sex of victim. The results virtually mirrored each other. For spousal assault the age range 15-24 the percentage of violence against women was 89 per cent. For the 25-34 it was 83 per cent, for 35-44, the percentage fell to 79 per cent. As the ages went up, the differences between men and women began to shrink. It was 74 per cent from 45-54, 72 per cent from 55-64 and 73 per cent for those over 65.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2012001/article/11643/tbl/tbl2-2-eng.htm

Violence Dating

For dating violence the number dropped from 85 per cent between 15-24, to 78 per cent between 25-34, 74 per cent for 35- 44, 71 per cent from 45-54, 60 percent for 45-54 and 56 percent for 55-65 and 65 plus respectively. Ultimately dating violence against women was 75 per cent while spousal violence was 80.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2012001/article/11643/tbl/tbl2-3-eng.htm

VIolence Spouses