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Intimate partner violence (IPV) encompasses a broad range of behaviours, ranging from emotional and financial abuse to physical and sexual assault. Due to its widespread prevalence and its far-ranging immediate and long-term consequences for victims,1 their families, and for communities as a whole, IPV is considered a major public health problem (World Health Organization 2017). In addition to the direct impacts on victims, IPV also has broader economic consequences (Peterson et al. 2018) and has been linked to the perpetuation of a cycle of intergenerational violence, leading to additional trauma.
Many victimization surveys in Canada and elsewhere show that the overall prevalence of self-reported IPV is similar when comparing women and men. That said, looking beyond a high-level overall measure is valuable and can reveal important context and details about IPV. An overall measure often encompasses multiple types of IPV, including one-time experiences and patterns of abusive behaviour. These differences in patterns and contexts help to underscore the point that there is not one singular experience of IPV. Rather, different types of intimate partner victimization-and different profiles among various populations-exist and are important to acknowledge as they will call for different types of interventions, programs, and supports for victims.
Research to date has shown that women disproportionately experience the most severe forms of IPV (Burczycka 2016; Breiding et al. 2014), such as being choked, being assaulted or threatened with a weapon, or being sexually assaulted. Additionally, women are more likely to experience more frequent instances of violence and more often report injury and negative physical and emotional consequences as a result of the violence (Burczycka 2016). Though most instances of IPV do not come to the attention of police, women comprise the majority of victims in cases that are reported (Conroy 2021). Furthermore, homicide data have consistently shown that women victims of homicide in Canada are more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than by any other type of perpetrator (Roy and Marcellus 2019). Among solved homicides in 2019, 47% of women who were victims of homicides were killed by an intimate partner, compared with 6% of homicide victims who were men.
This article, focusing on the overall Canadian population, is one in a series of short reports examining experiences of intimate partner...