Status of Women committee  In order to measure spousal violence, we use a scale of 10 questions. It ranges from everything such as threatening to hit you with their fists or throwing something at you that could hurt you, to being choked, beaten, sexually assaulted, etc. There are 10 items. I should say t

Status of Women committee  There is no statistical difference between the 37% and 36% for women, or the 15% and 17% for men. Although they look different, when you do a statistical test those numbers aren't different. I think the reason you're seeing fewer men reporting than women is that they're less like

Status of Women committee  This is often one of the drawbacks in conducting a national survey. People want it to answer all kinds of questions for various segments of the population. Certainly, we are limited by the fact that the survey is conducted in only English and French. We have conducted other sur

Status of Women committee  The decline that I spoke of very early was from our victimization survey taken in the study period between the 1999 and 2004. That was with wife assault. Drilling down even further, in particular with respect to previous relationships, there have been decreases. This is also supp

Status of Women committee  It's different for men and women. There has been a very slow increase, a gradual increase in the trend of senior abuse. For senior women who are victims of violence, by and large it is a spouse or intimate partner committing the violence. I don't know if you've heard the expressi

Status of Women committee  In Canada, I think there's only one facility for senior, older Canadians who are abused by intimate partners--I think it's still there in Calgary--called Kirby House. So there is one in the system. But the rates are relatively low. We do know that rates of spousal violence do dec

Status of Women committee  I was just going to say that I couldn't speak directly about the impact of child care and rates of violence, but we do know that in Quebec, for example, spousal violence rates are the lowest, yet they have the highest rates of common law relationships, which is interesting. I kno

Status of Women committee  We do look at income and education; those are the standard socio-demographic characteristics we look at. We found that urban/rural residency, education, and income really don't have an effect on risk of spousal violence. Of those that I listed for you on page 4, probably the one

Status of Women committee  In the victimization survey, what we do is we ask about very specific acts of violence, and so for anyone who says yes, then we follow up with a series of questions to get at the nature of the violence and the extent of the violence. One of the questions we ask is whether the pol

Status of Women committee  We haven't looked necessarily at missing persons. I know certainly we have worked somewhat with the RCMP in their missing persons area. This area is looking specifically at human trafficking. We are working with them, looking at these women who are missing, especially aboriginal

Status of Women committee  You're right in saying the whole issue of Internet luring is fairly new. With technology, crimes are always changing and becoming more sophisticated. Really, the crime doesn't change. It's for the purpose of child sexual abuse, or whatever. It's the method in which these children

Status of Women committee  I could provide some of that information to you, but perhaps not today. Certainly we are looking at the impact of the elimination or reduction of the use of conditional sentencing. At this point, we haven't looked at gender differences, but it's something that we would plan to lo

Status of Women committee  I'd be happy to. Actually over the past year and a half or so I have been a member of the interdepartmental working group on trafficking in persons, and as a Stats Can representative, I have been working with Canada Border Services Agency, CIC, and the RCMP looking at ways to m

Status of Women committee  Bonjour, madame. What I can tell you about women in the system—because I was part of a larger study back in the early 1990s, looking at federally sentenced female offenders—is that perhaps female offenders have a history of abuse at higher rates than male offenders. They've com

Status of Women committee  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