Madam Chair and members of the standing committee, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to present our most recent statistics on intimate partner violence in Canada. Much of the information that I will be focusing on this afternoon is available in several publications, and I've provided the clerk a complete list of them with key data points in a written brief for your reference. It is important to note that the data I would be highlighting comes from various sources, including police-reported data and self-reported victimization surveys.
Police data captures forms of intimate partner violence that meet the criminal threshold and are reported to police. However, as many of you are well aware, intimate partner violence often goes unreported to the authorities and includes a range of abuses. These include psychological, emotional and financial abuse, all of which can be extremely harmful but will not be collected through police data. As such, I will be drawing from both types of data sources to provide a full picture of the nature and extent of intimate partner violence in Canada.
Overall trends of intimate partner violence over the past two decades have declined. According to the 2019 general social survey on victimization, spousal violence—that is, physical and sexual assault and the threat of violence—in the provinces was significantly lower in 2019 than in 1999. Over this time period, spousal violence decreased for both women and men. Overall trends for police-reported data showed declines in intimate partner violence from 2009 through 2015. However, more recently there have been incremental year-over-year increases. Specifically, the rate of police-reported intimate partner violence against women increased 10% in 2020 from what was recorded in 2017. Similar increases over the same period of time were noted for men.
Concerns about the impact of lockdown restrictions during the pandemic have also been noted, and through a web panel survey conducted during the early months of the pandemic, 8% of Canadians reported that they were very or extremely concerned about the possibility of violence in the home. This proportion was higher for women than for men.
Through the survey of safety in public and private spaces, we measure lifetime experiences of all forms of intimate partner violence, including physical and sexual assault, and psychological, emotional and financial abuse. According to this survey, 44% of women reported experiencing some form of violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime, that is, since the age of 15. In addition, almost one-quarter of women reported experiencing physical assault, compared with 17% of men. Notably, women were six times more likely than men to have been sexually assaulted by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
Women in some population groups are at greater risk of experiencing intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Indigenous women are at great risk of experiencing intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Specifically, about six in 10 first nation and Métis women stated that they had experienced some form of psychological, physical or sexual abuse committed by an intimate partner in their lifetime, as did 44% of Inuit women. Taken together, this represented 61% of all indigenous women.
Sexual minority people—those whose sexual orientation is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or another sexual orientation—are much more likely to experience all forms of intimate partner violence. For example, in 2018, two-thirds of sexual minority women had experienced at least one type of intimate partner violence since the age of 15. More than one-quarter of sexual minority women reported being sexually assaulted by an intimate partner at some point since age 15.
In addition, more than half of women with disabilities experienced some form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Almost one-third had been physically assaulted, while 18% reported being sexually assaulted by an intimate partner in their lifetime. More than one-quarter of intimate partner violence victims experience violence or abuse on a monthly basis or more frequently, and one in 10 women victims experiences it almost daily.
Measures of intimate partner violence often take into account the levels of fear that victims experience. Being afraid of a partner can indicate that experiences of violence are more coercive, relatively more severe and more likely to reflect a pattern of behaviour by an abusive partner. Compared with men, fear is considerably more common among women who experience intimate partner violence. Nearly four in 10 women who were victims said they were afraid of their partner at some point in their life because of the abuse.
The type of intimate partner violence experienced is associated with the likelihood of being fearful. Among victims of intimate partner violence who experienced solely psychological forms of abuse, 12% of women and 4% of men stated they had been afraid of a partner. In contrast, 55% of women—