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Statistics Canada’s own research found that approximately eighty percent of spousal violence goes unreported to police. That figure has not improved in twenty-five years.

That gap - between what is lived and what is recorded - is not a coincidence. It is the subject of this work.

Abuse Lives Where Evidence Cannot Follow

The abuser understands, often intuitively, what the legal system requires. A bruise fades. A threat made in private leaves no record. Financial control - draining accounts, blocking employment, creating debt in a partner’s name - does not appear on an intake form at a police station. Psychological degradation, isolation from family, surveillance of a phone or a schedule: these are not less harmful because they are harder to document. They are, in many cases, more harmful - because they bind a person to a life they cannot escape, long before any physical act occurs.

Canadian criminal law has no single offence called domestic violence. It has assault. It has criminal harassment. It has uttering threats. What it has not had - until very recently, with the introduction of Bill C-16 in 2025 - is a legal category for the pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour that makes all of those individual acts possible. The law, for most of its history, has required each act to be proven separately. The lived experience of abuse is not separate. It is continuous.

When You Report, the System Responds - But Not Always in the Way You Need

Mandatory charging policies mean that when police attend a domestic violence call, the decision to lay charges belongs to the Crown, not the victim. This was designed to protect survivors from pressure not to report. In practice, it also means that once you call, you cannot stop what follows. The fear of losing control over the process - of charges laid that escalate the danger, of testimony compelled in a courtroom, of a partner who now knows you cooperated with police - is one of the documented reasons survivors do not call. The system removed the burden from you and, in doing so, also removed your voice.

In family court - where children, housing, and financial survival are at stake - raising domestic violence invites its own risks. Allegations of family violence are frequently met with counter-allegations. A child who is reluctant to see an abusive parent may be characterized as manipulated rather than afraid. The same disclosure that the 2021 amendments to the Divorce Act now require courts to consider can become the ground on which you are re-examined, re-questioned, and re-doubted.

The Law Has Changed. The Institutions Are Catching Up.

The 2021 amendments to Canada’s Divorce Act are the most significant reform to family law in decades. Courts are now required to consider family violence - including coercive and controlling behaviour - in all parenting decisions. The old presumption that children benefit from maximum contact with both parents regardless of family violence has been removed. A survivor planning to relocate with children can, in certain circumstances, do so without the usual sixty-day notice requirement where family violence creates a risk.

Keira’s Law now requires judges to receive education on intimate partner violence and coercive control - an acknowledgment that the judicial system had been making decisions without the knowledge those decisions required.

These are real changes. They are also incomplete ones. Legislation changes faster than institutions. A law that requires courts to consider coercive control does not, by itself, ensure that every police officer, every Crown attorney, every social worker, every healthcare provider understands what coercive control looks like and why it matters. That work is ongoing.

One Person at a Time

The purpose of this work is not to criticize Canadian institutions for the pleasure of criticism. It is to make visible the structural conditions that keep abuse hidden - so that survivors can navigate those conditions more knowledgeably, so that practitioners can serve their clients more effectively, and so that institutions can identify and correct the mechanisms that are working against the people they are supposed to protect.

Change in systems is slow. It happens through court decisions and legislative amendments and policy reviews and the accumulation of documented evidence that something is not working. But it also happens through individual encounters: a lawyer who screens for coercive control during a client intake. A police officer who understands that the absence of physical injury is not the absence of violence. A judge who has learned that a child’s reluctance to visit a parent may be information rather than manipulation.

Read Further

This article draws on a comprehensive legal and institutional analysis published in the CanLII legal commentary collection:

The full research and analysis are available in:

© 2026 Systemic Press Inc. - Alberta, Canada. All rights reserved.

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