In our national victims survey we ask about race and ethnicity, so we do know if respondents are visible minority or immigrant and when they immigrated to Canada. Remember, this is a telephone survey that is conducted only in English and French, so we are limited.
That said, we have found through our survey that rates of violence for both visible minority and immigrant women are in fact lower than the rates for the general population. We looked at why this might be and found that both visible minority and immigrant women were more likely to report lower rates of emotional abuse, which we know has a high correlation with violence. They are also less likely to say that their spouses are heavy drinkers. Also, there is a much lower prevalence of common law relationships among both visible minority and immigrant women.