The Violence Canada Never Counts

Every year, Statistics Canada publishes the number of victims of violence recorded by police. In 2024, police services counted 128,175 victims of intimate partner violence across the country[1]. The figure is precise, official, and necessarily incomplete: it captures only the portion reported to police. The most reliable evidence available indicates that the overwhelming majority of violent victimization in Canada never reaches a police file at all.

This is not speculation. Canada is one of the few countries that systematically measures the gap between the violence that occurs and the violence that is reported, through large national self-report surveys conducted by Statistics Canada. The results are consistent across decades, and they describe a system in which silence is the statistical norm.

A Note on What Is Being Counted

Two kinds of numbers appear throughout this article, and they measure different things. Police-reported data, collected through the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey, count victims: identified persons whose victimization came to the attention of police and met a criminal threshold. Self-report surveys, such as the General Social Survey on Victimization, count incidents: experiences of violence disclosed by survey respondents, whether or not any authority was ever involved. One person can account for multiple incidents, and Statistics Canada cautions that the two sources cannot be directly combined; they are complementary[2]. That is how this article treats them. The police data describe what institutions see. The survey data estimate what occurs.

Self-report surveys carry their own limitations. They depend on memory and on willingness to disclose to an interviewer, they exclude people living full time in institutions, and participation has declined over time: the 2019 General Social Survey had an overall response rate of 37.6 percent[2]. Statistics Canada compensates through statistical weighting, adjusting responses so that published estimates represent the Canadian population aged 15 and over[2]. The survey figures are therefore estimates rather than counts, designed to be nationally representative. They remain the only national measure of violence that does not first require a victim to contact an institution, which is precisely why they are indispensable to the question this article examines.

Six Percent

According to the 2019 General Social Survey on Victimization, there were approximately 940,000 incidents of sexual assault in Canada that year - incidents, not victims, since one person can experience more than one. Six percent were reported to police[2]. By comparison, 36 percent of physical assaults were reported. Statistics Canada describes reporting to police as the first and most substantial point of attrition for sexual assault: of every 1,000 sexual assaults reported to police, only a fraction result in charges, fewer proceed to court, and roughly one in nineteen ends with an accused person sentenced to custody[3].

The most recent data, from the 2025 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces, shows a modest change: 8.6 percent of victims of sexual assault said the most serious incident they experienced was reported to police, an increase from 4.3 percent in 2018[4]. Even after that increase, more than nine in ten sexual assaults in Canada remain outside the justice system entirely.

Eighty Percent

The pattern repeats within intimate relationships. According to the 2019 General Social Survey, 80 percent of people who experienced spousal violence said the police were never made aware of it[5]. Reporting has not improved over time; it has declined. In 1999, 28 percent of victims said the violence was reported to police. By 2019, that proportion had fallen to 19 percent. Women reported the violence 22 percent of the time, and men 14 percent[5].

Reporting is also tied to frequency. In Statistics Canada’s analysis of the 2018 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces, intimate partner violence against women came to the attention of police more often when it occurred monthly or more (13 percent) than when it occurred once (2 percent) or a few times (5 percent)[6]. The violence most likely to be seen by police, in other words, is violence that has already become frequent.

Thirty-Four Percent

The most sobering figure in the national data concerns not the police, but everyone else. One-third of spousal violence victims, 34 percent, did not speak with anyone at all about the violence they experienced. Not a family member, not a friend, not a doctor, not a lawyer. Silence was more common among men, at 44 percent, than among women, at 28 percent[5].

Among those who did speak to someone, the confidants were overwhelmingly informal: 47 percent spoke with a family member and 45 percent with a friend or neighbour, while fewer than one in five spoke with a doctor or nurse (17 percent) or a lawyer (15 percent)[5]. The institutions designed to respond to violence are, for most victims, the last to know, if they ever know at all.

Why Victims Stay Silent

Statistics Canada has asked victims directly why they do not report. The answers are remarkably stable across surveys. Victims most often describe the violence as a private or personal matter, characterize the incident as minor, or say they did not want the burden of dealing with police and the court process[3], [5]. For sexual assault specifically, victims cite feelings of shame or embarrassment (42 percent), a belief that they would not be believed (30 percent), or a concern that reporting would bring shame and dishonour to their family (26 percent), barriers cited far more often than by victims of other violent crimes[3].

These responses are consistent with victims’ perceptions of anticipated costs and expected outcomes. The surveys do not establish that victims know the justice system’s outcome statistics, and no causal claim can be drawn from these data. What the two records show is alignment: victims report anticipating that the process will not be worth its burdens[3], [5], and the documented outcomes of reported cases - roughly one custodial sentence for every nineteen police-reported sexual assaults[3] - do not contradict that expectation. Whether the alignment is coincidence or cause is a question the data cannot answer.

How Gender Shapes the Silence

Gender runs through both the violence and the silence, in opposite directions. Women bear more of the violence: they experienced police-reported intimate partner violence at 3.5 times the rate of men in 2024 and account for nearly eight in ten victims of intimate partner homicide[1], and they were more likely than men to be physically injured[5]. Men, by contrast, appear more often in the silence: 44 percent of male victims of spousal violence told no one at all, compared with 28 percent of women, and men were far less likely to speak with a family member or with a doctor or nurse[5]. Statistics Canada notes that stigma surrounding male victims may make men more reluctant to report to authorities[7].

The reporting gap itself, however, is not primarily a gender gap. In 2025, similar proportions of women (8.7 percent) and men (8.4 percent) who were sexually assaulted said the most serious incident was reported to police[4]. Underreporting is the norm for everyone. What gender shapes is who is harmed, how severely, and whom victims feel able to tell. An institutional response calibrated only to those who report will therefore miss men and women in different ways: women whose repeated victimization never crosses the reporting threshold, and men for whom disclosure itself carries a distinct social cost.

Nor is gender the only line along which the national averages conceal variation. Indigenous women are markedly overrepresented among victims: 61 percent have experienced intimate partner violence in their lifetime, compared with 44 percent of non-Indigenous women[9], and over half (52 percent) have been sexually assaulted since age 15, compared with 37 percent of non-Indigenous women[4]. The reporting dimension connects directly to institutional trust: Indigenous people were about twice as likely as non-Indigenous people to report having little or no confidence in their local police service, a mistrust that Statistics Canada situates in the history of colonization and its institutions[8]. A full treatment of how underreporting varies across Indigenous, racialized, and other communities is beyond the scope of this article. The national averages presented here should therefore be read as averages: the silence is not evenly distributed.

What the Official Numbers Cannot Show

The consequences of undercounting are not abstract. Police-reported data show that women experienced intimate partner violence at 3.5 times the rate of men in 2024, and that of the 963 victims of intimate partner homicide recorded since 2014, nearly eight in ten were women and girls[1]. Those homicide figures are complete, because death is always counted. Everything preceding the homicide, the years of escalation that self-report surveys tell us mostly go unreported, is largely invisible in official statistics.

Any policy, budget, or court practice calibrated to police-reported numbers is therefore calibrated to a small fraction of the problem. The 128,175 recorded victims of intimate partner violence in 2024 sit atop a far larger population of uncounted victims, most of whom told no authority, and one-third of whom told no one at all.

Where the Data Points

The same data that documents the gap also indicates where any serious response would have to operate. Healthcare is the clearest example. Only 17 percent of spousal violence victims spoke with a doctor or nurse[5], yet health settings are among the few institutions most people will eventually enter for other reasons. Routine, trauma-informed screening in healthcare has the potential to reach victims the justice system never will.

Policing and the courts are the second. Among those who did report a sexual assault to police in 2025, about half felt that speaking with police was not worth the time and effort[4]. Reforms already in motion are directed at exactly this problem: judicial education on intimate partner violence and coercive control under Keira’s Law, and the requirement introduced by the 2021 Divorce Act amendments that courts consider family violence, including coercive and controlling behaviour, in parenting decisions. Institutions that respond knowledgeably lower the anticipated cost of disclosure, and anticipated costs - burden, embarrassment, doubt of being believed - dominate the reasons victims themselves give for staying silent[3], [5].

The third is the design of reporting itself. The most common reasons victims give for not reporting are not fear alone but the burden of the process[3], [5]. Reporting pathways that do not require immediate entry into a criminal prosecution, such as third-party reporting and victim services detached from charging decisions, respond to the stated reasons directly. And because one-third of victims tell no one at all[5], no reform of institutional intake can reach them; whatever reaches them must come through the people a victim might tell first: family members, friends, and neighbours.

Taken together, the figures in this article measure one distance from three directions: six percent of sexual assaults reported, eighty percent of spousal violence unreported, one in three victims telling no one at all. Each is a different instrument reading the same gap between what Canadians experience and what their institutions record.

Read Further

The full research and structural analysis are available in: