Madam Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to present our most recent statistics on senior abuse in Canada.
Much of the information I'll be focusing on this afternoon is available in the publication “Family violence in Canada: A statistical profile”. A link to the report and a series of custom tabulations have been provided to the clerk for your reference.
It's important to note that the data from this report highlight those forms of abuse that meet the criminal threshold and that were reported to the police. As a result, it does not provide a complete picture of the overall prevalence of senior abuse as it does not capture emotional, psychological and financial abuse. Also note that Statistics Canada is working towards collecting disaggregated data, that is, by ethnicity, life stages and gender, which will give us a better understanding of which seniors are most at risk of abuse.
Also note that I'll be referring to the most recent police data, which is from 2019. The 2020 data will be released at the end of July. This information will be critical to our understanding of the impact of COVID restrictions on seniors and whether or not they were more at risk of being a victim.
In 2019, there were more than 14,000 senior victims of police-reported violence in Canada. By senior victims, I mean those individuals who are 65 years of age and older. Of these victims, 55% were men, while 45% were women. This translates into a rate of 227 seniors per 100,000.
Since 2014, there has been a steady increase in police-reported violence perpetrated against seniors. Specifically, we've noted a 29% increase in victimization rates between 2014 and 2019. Over the same time period, the rate of violence increased more for senior women than for senior men. We also noted that there were increases in violence against other age groups—that is, people between 0 and 17, or 18 to 64—but it was only an increase of 16%.
Based on the police data, the highest rates of senior victimization were noted in the three territories, as well as Manitoba and New Brunswick, while Nova Scotia reported the lowest.
According to the 2016 census, 7% of all seniors lived in shared dwellings such as senior resident nursing homes. From police-reported data, we were able to get a glimpse of the violence committed against seniors in these environments. In 2019, just over one in 10 senior victims of police-reported violence were residing in a nursing or retirement home at the time of the incident. Two-thirds of these victims were senior women. Most of these seniors who experienced violence experienced physical assault, while one in seven were sexually assaulted.
Within the nursing and retirement home environment, the perpetrators of this violence were most often seniors themselves. They were a casual acquaintance of the victim, a neighbour within the retirement home or.... We can't tell from the data whether these individuals were suffering from some sort of cognitive impairment or dementia, which could have explained the reason for the violence. Further to that, the police-reported data noted very few cases where the perpetrator of the violence was a staff member of the residence.
Another source of data for senior abuse is the general social survey on victimization, which measures three types of violence—sexual assault, robbery and physical assault—as well as five forms of non-violent crime. These data are critical to our understanding as they capture victimization whether it was reported to the police or not.
According to the 2019 GSS, one in 10 seniors self-reported being a victim of household or violent crime in the previous 12 months and 84,000 seniors were victims of a violent crime. Through the GSS, we are also able to capture experiences of emotional and financial abuse of older adults by a family member or caregiver. Recent results found that approximately 2% of seniors reported experiencing financial or emotional abuse over the past five years. Finally, the GSS also noted that 14% of seniors experienced fraud over the previous five years.
There are challenges in collecting data on elder and senior abuse. Specifically, to obtain robust data, there must be an agreed-upon definition of “senior”, an agreed-upon definition of “abuse” and a sound method on how to capture this information from those living in an institution.
Thank you to the chair and members for their attention this afternoon.