Actually, the data isn't there. This is one of the reasons we need to name it femicide.
In many cases, when we are looking at the homicide numbers, it is sometimes very hard to identify when it is the case that a woman is a victim of a femicide linked to IPV. In some cases, the police do not ask that question. In very many cases, it takes advocates to bring it forward and say that they see this as IPV, that it is related to violence and that they want them to go back and look at it again.
There's no consistency in how the data is collected. We need information on the background of victims, on their social location, their race, their geographic location and how many times they reported to the police before this happened. If they never reported to the police, why didn't they report? What is the family saying about what happened? What did the neighbours see?
This is the sort of information we were able to gather through a multi-year, government-funded research grant run by Dr. Myrna Dawson, which led to the foundation of the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability. That is why we need data. It's because we need accountability.
We also need to know how many times a charge is laid. What happens afterward?
Of course, that data is somewhere in StatsCan or somewhere in a police database, but we need it collected and collated for us.