Domestic Abuse Statistics Canada [2026]

In 2024, Statistics Canada 2025 recorded 128,175 victims of police-reported intimate partner violence across Canada — a rate of 356 per 100,000 population, representing a 14 percent increase since 2018. Women account for 78 percent of all victims. This post compiles national domestic abuse statistics for Canada: provincial comparisons, gender and age breakdowns, Indigenous women’s elevated risk, and the structural gap between what police record and what victims actually experience.

What is domestic abuse in Canada

Domestic abuse — also called intimate partner violence (IPV) or family violence — encompasses any pattern of physical, sexual, emotional, financial, or psychological harm committed by a current or former spouse, common-law partner, or dating partner. Canada has no single Criminal Code offence labelled “domestic violence,” and Statistics Canada measures it across multiple survey and administrative data streams. The Department of Justice Canada 2024 defines IPV as any abuse within a current or former intimate relationship.

Acts of domestic abuse are prosecuted under existing Criminal Code provisions — including assault (ss. 265–268), criminal harassment (s. 264), and forcible confinement (s. 279) — with spousal or intimate-partner abuse treated as an aggravating factor at sentencing under s. 718.2(a)(ii). This means a conviction for assault carries a heavier sentence when the victim is or was an intimate partner, even though the charge itself is the standard assault provision.

For the broader research context on abuse across age groups, see our abuse research hub.

How many Canadians experience domestic abuse: 2024 national snapshot

Statistics Canada 2025 reported 128,175 victims of police-reported intimate partner violence in 2024 — a national rate of 356 per 100,000 population aged 12 and older. The rate rose 14 percent from 311 per 100,000 in 2018, when Statistics Canada began publishing comparable annual police-reported IPV data.

Physical assault was the most common form of police-reported IPV in 2024, accounting for 72 percent of all incidents, followed by criminal harassment (7 percent) and uttering threats (7 percent). Sexual offences accounted for 9 percent of all incidents but rose to 11 percent for incidents involving women and girls, per Statistics Canada 2025.

Relationship proximity shapes risk. Nearly half (47 percent) of all victims were living with the accused at the time of the incident. Among women and girls specifically, 63 percent were victimized by a current partner and 35 percent by a former partner, according to Statistics Canada 2025.

Provincial comparisons: which provinces have the highest rates

Provincial rates in 2024 varied by more than 2.5 times between the lowest and highest provinces, per Statistics Canada’s provincial supplemental table 2025.

Saskatchewan recorded Canada’s highest provincial rate in 2024, at 714 per 100,000 — more than double Ontario’s 278 per 100,000, the lowest of any province. Manitoba (607) followed as the second-highest province. Ontario’s rate, while the lowest among provinces, is not stable: it increased from 233 per 100,000 in 2018 to 278 in 2024, a 19 percent rise — faster than the national rate increase of 14 percent over the same period, according to Statistics Canada 2025.

Quebec showed the largest proportional increase among large provinces, rising from 314 per 100,000 in 2018 to 401 per 100,000 in 2024 — a 28 percent increase. British Columbia was the only large province to record a rate below the national average in 2024, at 269 per 100,000, essentially unchanged from 270 per 100,000 in 2018, per Statistics Canada 2025.

The three territories recorded dramatically higher rates than any province. Nunavut’s rate of 5,786 per 100,000 is more than 16 times the national provincial average. These elevated territorial rates reflect a combination of geographic isolation, limited service infrastructure, and the disproportionate presence of Indigenous populations facing compounded risk factors (see below). For the city-level perspective within the country’s most populous province, see our post on domestic abuse statistics in Toronto.

Who is most at risk: gender, age, and relationship-type breakdown

The gender gap in police-reported intimate partner violence is one of the most consistent findings in Canada’s criminal justice data. Women and girls experience IPV at a rate 3.5 times higher than men and boys, and that gap is consistent across age groups.

Young women and girls aged 12 to 24 faced the highest police-reported IPV rate in Canada in 2023 at 752 per 100,000 — nearly seven times the rate for men and boys of the same age — according to Statistics Canada 2024. Women’s victimization rate peaks at age 30, where the 2024 police-reported rate reached 1,146 per 100,000, according to Statistics Canada 2025.

The self-reported picture captures a broader victimization pattern. As of the 2019 General Social Survey — the most recent available self-reported victimization cycle — 3.5 percent of Canadians with a current or former spouse reported experiencing spousal violence in the preceding five years, representing approximately 432,000 women and 279,000 men. Women’s five-year rate was 4.2 percent, compared to 2.7 percent for men, per Statistics Canada Juristat 2021.

Post-separation violence is a recognized risk escalation point. As of the 2019 GSS, nearly half (45 percent) of victims abused by a former spouse reported that violence continued after separation, and 38 percent of post-separation incidents occurred six or more months after the split. Women were injured more frequently than men in these post-separation incidents (39 percent vs. 23 percent), per Statistics Canada Juristat 2021.

Intersectional risk factors compound baseline gender exposure. Sexual minority women reported a lifetime IPV prevalence of 67 percent, compared to 44 percent for heterosexual women. Women with disabilities experienced physical IPV at 32 percent versus 17 percent for women without disabilities, according to the Department of Justice Canada’s HELP Toolkit 2024.

For companion data on abuse among older adults and within institutional care settings, see our post on elder abuse statistics.

Indigenous women and domestic abuse: elevated risk and systemic factors

Indigenous women face intimate partner violence at rates that substantially exceed the national average across every available metric, reflecting both structural inequality and the long-term effects of colonization on community safety.

Indigenous women in Canada experienced intimate partner violence at a lifetime rate of 61 percent — 17 percentage points higher than non-Indigenous women — and were almost twice as likely to experience physical abuse (42 percent vs. 22 percent) and sexual abuse (21 percent vs. 11 percent), according to Statistics Canada’s analysis of the 2018 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces.

Severe forms of intimate partner violence are disproportionately concentrated among Indigenous women. They are nearly three times more likely to be choked (17 percent vs. 6 percent), to have a weapon threatened against them (13 percent vs. 4 percent), or to be beaten (16 percent vs. 6 percent). More than half (52 percent) reported fear of their partner, compared to 36 percent of non-Indigenous women, per Statistics Canada 2021.

As of the 2019 General Social Survey, Indigenous people overall reported a five-year spousal violence rate of 7.5 percent — more than double the 3.4 percent rate for non-Indigenous people. Inuit reported the highest rate at 15 percent, followed by Métis at 9.4 percent, per Statistics Canada Juristat 2021.

Indigenous women who experienced violence reported systemic barriers to help-seeking: mistrust of the criminal justice system, lack of culturally appropriate services, remoteness of communities, and perceived lack of confidentiality. Indigenous women were twice as likely as non-Indigenous women to report low confidence in police (17 percent vs. 8.2 percent), according to Statistics Canada 2022. These barriers directly suppress police-reported figures for Indigenous communities, meaning the true victimization rate is likely higher than even the self-reported survey data captures.

Why 80% of incidents go unreported: the self-reported versus police-reported gap

Canada’s police-reported IPV statistics represent only a fraction of actual victimization. The scale of that gap is documented by Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey on Victimization — a self-reported survey that asks Canadians about their experiences regardless of whether those experiences were reported to police.

As of the 2019 GSS — the most recent available self-reported victimization cycle — 80 percent of spousal violence was never reported to police. Only 19 percent of victims reported, down from 28 percent in 1999, according to Statistics Canada’s October 2021 Daily release. Women’s reporting declined sharply, from 38 percent in 1999 to 22 percent in 2019, while men’s rate held approximately constant at 14 to 15 percent.

The reasons victims gave for not reporting to police are structural, not incidental. Per Statistics Canada Juristat 2021, the three most common reasons were: the incident was a private or personal matter handled informally (68 percent), the incident was too minor to report (61 percent), and no one was harmed (55 percent). These reasons — privacy, minimization, normalization — account for far more non-reporting than fear of not being believed.

This structural gap creates a paradox in the trend data. Self-reported spousal violence prevalence fell from 7.5 percent in 1999 to 3.5 percent in 2019 — a 54 percent decline over 20 years — suggesting either a genuine reduction in victimization or increasing reluctance to disclose, according to Statistics Canada 2021. Yet over the same recent period (2018 to 2024), police-reported IPV increased 14 percent. The divergence between self-report and police-record trends reflects changes in reporting behaviour, policing policy, and data collection methodology — not a straightforward story of more or less abuse occurring in Canadian homes.

Domestic abuse homicide and femicide: Canada’s intimate partner homicide data

In 2024, 100 people were killed by a spouse or intimate partner in Canada — 17 percent of all 788 homicide victims — and 81 of those 100 (81 percent) were women, up from 53 women among 72 victims in 2023. This represents a 39 percent increase in intimate partner homicides in a single year, according to Statistics Canada’s Homicide Survey released December 2025.

Since 2014, 963 people have been killed by a spouse or intimate partner in Canada, and 79 percent of those victims were women and girls. Increases in intimate partner homicides occurred in 8 of Canada’s 10 provinces in 2024, according to Statistics Canada 2025.

Between 2011 and 2021, there were 1,125 gender-related homicides of women and girls in Canada. Two thirds (66 percent) were perpetrated by intimate partners — 30 percent by a legally married spouse, 28 percent by a common-law partner, and 26 percent by a non-spousal intimate partner — according to Statistics Canada Juristat 2023.

Indigenous women accounted for 21 percent of gender-related homicide victims between 2011 and 2021 — representing 233 women — despite comprising approximately 5 percent of Canada’s female population. In 2021, the gender-related homicide rate for Indigenous women was 1.72 per 100,000, more than triple the overall rate of 0.54 per 100,000, per Statistics Canada Juristat 2023.

What this means for Canadian families and workplaces

The data across the preceding sections has concrete implications for Canadian families, employers, and anyone who supports a victim navigating a domestic abuse situation.

Physical injury is common and often medically significant. As of the 2019 GSS, 33 percent of spousal violence victims sustained a physical injury, including bruises (83 percent of injuries), cuts or scratches (44 percent), and broken bones (9 percent). Women were injured more frequently than men (39 percent vs. 23 percent), and 11 percent of injured victims required hospitalization, per Statistics Canada Juristat 2021. These injury rates apply only to reported incidents — because 80 percent of spousal violence is never reported, the full burden of physical harm is substantially larger than these figures indicate.

Domestic violence has measurable economic costs. Spousal violence costs the Canadian economy an estimated $7.4 billion annually — based on a Department of Justice Canada analysis of 2009 data — with victims bearing 80.7 percent of those costs ($6.0 billion), followed by the justice system ($545.2 million, 7.3 percent). This remains the most recent comprehensive economic estimate; current costs are likely higher given the 14 percent increase in police-reported victimization since 2018.

Workplace spillover is documented and quantified. A pan-Canadian survey of 8,429 workers conducted between 2013 and 2014 found that 81.9 percent of workers who experienced domestic violence reported it negatively affected their job performance; 53.5 percent said the violence continued at or near their workplace; and 39.5 percent took time off work as a direct result. Canadian employers lose approximately $77.9 million annually as a direct result, according to International Journal of Workplace Health Management 2016.

As licensed PIs operating across the GTA, we see these patterns in our client referrals — most often when a victim or their family needs documentation to support a restraining order application, a custody proceeding, or a workplace safety accommodation. The data matches what we observe: incidents frequently occur and escalate before anyone outside the household takes action, and early documentation of patterns — dates, locations, incident types — is consistently more useful to legal counsel than a single after-the-fact account.

Families across Canada who need confidential documentation of domestic abuse patterns can reach our team at +1 (888) 680-0036 — Licensed · Insured · Bonded. Our domestic violence investigations service is designed to document abuse patterns in a way that supports protective orders, custody applications, and workplace-safety referrals. For the city-level breakdown of these patterns in Canada’s largest city, see our companion post on domestic abuse statistics in Toronto.