Domestic Abuse Statistics Toronto [2026]

Toronto Police Service 2025 recorded 18,122 intimate partner violence incidents in 2024 — 89 percent of all family violence occurrences — a figure that held steady between 17,200 and 19,300 every year since 2014. In July 2023, Toronto City Council unanimously declared gender-based violence an epidemic, making Toronto the first major Canadian city to do so. The statistics below draw from TPS’s first-ever neighbourhood-level IPV report and Statistics Canada comparisons.

What is domestic abuse — the legal and operational definitions

Canada has no single Criminal Code offence called “domestic violence” or “intimate partner violence.” The Department of Justice Canada 2024 defines intimate partner violence as physical, sexual, emotional, financial, and psychological abuse committed by a current or former spouse, common-law partner, or dating partner.

Acts of family violence are prosecuted under existing Criminal Code offences — including assault (ss. 265–268), criminal harassment (s. 264), and forcible confinement (s. 279) — with spousal abuse treated as an aggravating factor at sentencing under s. 718.2(a)(ii).

Five operational categories are recognized across Canadian federal policy:

• Physical abuse — deliberate use of force causing bodily injury, pain, or impairment, including hitting, restraining, and choking.
• Sexual abuse — any non-consensual sexual contact or coercion within an intimate or family relationship.
• Emotional and psychological abuse — threats, humiliation, intimidation, isolation, or controlling behaviour designed to undermine a partner’s autonomy and sense of safety.
• Financial abuse — theft, fraud, restricting access to money, or coercive control of a partner’s economic resources.
• Neglect — in caregiving contexts, the failure to meet a dependent partner’s basic needs, including abandonment.

All five types can occur independently or in combination. In Toronto, as across Canada, police-recorded incidents predominantly reflect physical and criminal-harassment offences — the types most likely to generate a police occurrence report — while emotional, financial, and psychological abuse remain substantially undercounted in any police dataset.

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

Toronto’s domestic abuse snapshot: 2014–2024 trend

Toronto’s IPV occurrence count was 18,584 in 2014 and 18,122 in 2024 — a difference of less than half a percent across a full decade, according to Toronto Police Service 2025. Annual figures fluctuated within a range of approximately 17,200 to 19,300 over the 11-year period, showing neither a sustained decline nor a significant increase. The consistency of the numbers is itself a finding: a decade of Toronto Police Service programs, provincial legislation, and City of Toronto funding commitments has not moved the volume of reported incidents.

The data portal released by TPS in November 2025 is the first time the service has published neighbourhood-level, division-level, monthly, and day-of-week breakdowns for intimate partner violence covering all 11 years from 2014 through 2024, according to TPS Data Portal 2025. Before this release, no comparable municipal IPV dataset was publicly available for Toronto, which is why historic analyses relied on Statistics Canada aggregate provincial data rather than city-level figures.

Nationally, the picture is markedly worse. Police-reported intimate partner violence across Canada reached 128,175 victims in 2024 — a rate of 356 per 100,000 population aged 12 and older — representing a 14 percent increase since 2018, according to Statistics Canada 2025. Toronto’s flat trend over the same period, while not a success story in absolute terms, does contrast with the rising national rate. Part of that contrast may reflect reporting patterns in a large urban centre with well-established community services, but the data does not permit a causal conclusion.

How Toronto’s rates compare: city, Ontario, and national context

Ontario recorded the lowest police-reported IPV rate of any province in 2024, at 278 victims per 100,000 population, compared to the Canadian national rate of 356 per 100,000 — a difference of 22 percent — according to Statistics Canada 2025. The contrast with the highest-rate provinces is stark.

Saskatchewan (714 per 100,000) and Manitoba (607 per 100,000) had the highest provincial IPV rates in 2024 — more than double Ontario’s rate of 278 — according to Statistics Canada 2025.

Ontario’s own rate is not stable: it rose from 233 per 100,000 in 2018 to 278 per 100,000 in 2024, a 19 percent increase over six years — faster than the national rate increase of 14 percent over the same period — according to Statistics Canada 2025. Toronto-specific per-100,000 rates are not directly comparable to provincial rates because TPS counts police occurrences while Statistics Canada counts victims, and Toronto’s population denominator is measured differently from provincial population figures. The tables above use the Statistics Canada provincial comparators as the closest available benchmarks.

Who is most at risk: demographic breakdown for Toronto

The gender gap in intimate partner violence is one of the most consistent findings in the Canadian data. Nationally, women and girls account for 78 percent of all police-reported IPV victims — experiencing IPV at a rate of 553 per 100,000 population, compared to 158 per 100,000 for men and boys — a ratio of 3.5 to 1, according to Statistics Canada 2025. Age, relationship type, and Indigenous identity each compound that baseline risk.

Age cohort breakdown (police-reported rates, Canada 2023):

Young women and girls aged 12 to 24 face the highest rate of police-reported intimate partner violence in Canada, at 752 per 100,000 population in 2023 — nearly seven times the rate for men and boys of the same age (111 per 100,000) — according to Statistics Canada 2024. The age gradient reflects both first-relationship vulnerability and the concentration of coercive control patterns in early adulthood.

Relationship type and living arrangement risk factors:

• Nationally, 47 percent of IPV victims were living with their accused at the time of the incident, and 63 percent of female victims were victimized by a current partner (versus 35 percent by a former partner), per Statistics Canada 2025.
• As of Statistics Canada’s 2019 General Social Survey, nearly half (45 percent) of victims abused by a former spouse reported that the violence continued after separation — underscoring that separation is a recognized risk escalation point, not a resolution, per Statistics Canada 2021.
• As of Statistics Canada’s 2018 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces, Indigenous women in Canada experience intimate partner violence at a lifetime rate of 61 percent — compared to 44 percent for non-Indigenous women — and are almost twice as likely to experience physical abuse (42 percent vs. 22 percent), per Statistics Canada 2021.

These demographic cuts reflect national data. Toronto-specific breakdowns by age, Indigenous identity, or relationship type are not yet published by TPS in the first-edition IPV report, though the data portal is designed to support future cuts at the neighbourhood and divisional level.

For companion research on elder intimate partner violence and family violence against older adults, see our post on elder abuse statistics.

Neighbourhood hotspots: Toronto IPV rates by division and community

Toronto Police Service’s November 2025 IPV data portal published neighbourhood-level incident rates for the first time, revealing significant geographic concentration of intimate partner violence across the city.

Weston had the highest rate of intimate partner violence of any Toronto neighbourhood in 2024, at 1,316 incidents per 100,000 residents, followed by Beechborough-Greenbrook (1,296), Weston-Pelham Park (1,188), New Toronto (1,115), and Black Creek (1,107) — all located within west-end police divisions 11, 12, 22, and 31, according to Toronto Police Service 2025.

All five of Toronto’s highest-rate neighbourhoods are in the city’s west end. The five-neighbourhood cluster rate of approximately 1,200 per 100,000 is more than four times Ontario’s provincial average of 278 per 100,000 and more than three times the national average of 356 per 100,000. These rates count police-reported incidents only; given the 80 percent non-reporting rate documented in the national GSS data, actual prevalence in these neighbourhoods is likely substantially higher than the recorded figures indicate.

The TPS Data Portal 2025 includes neighbourhood-level, division-level, monthly, and day-of-week breakdowns for all 11 years from 2014 through 2024 — the first time TPS has published this level of geographic granularity for intimate partner violence. The portal enables year-over-year neighbourhood comparison and is expected to be updated with 2025 data following the annual reporting cycle.

Homicide and femicide: when domestic abuse turns fatal in Toronto

Intimate partner homicide is the most severe consequence of domestic abuse, and the Canadian data documents a consistent and alarming gender pattern.

Across Canada, 100 people were killed by a spouse or intimate partner in 2024 — 17 percent of all 788 homicide victims. Women accounted for 81 percent of those intimate partner homicide victims (81 women, up from 53 in 2023), according to Statistics Canada 2025.

Since 2014, nearly 8 in 10 (79 percent) of all 963 intimate partner homicide victims across Canada have been women and girls, according to Statistics Canada 2025. Between 2011 and 2021, two-thirds (66 percent) of all gender-related homicides of women and girls in Canada were perpetrated by an intimate partner — 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 2023.

Ontario recorded 282 homicides in 2024, a provincial rate of 1.75 per 100,000 — an increase of 0.6 percent from 2023 — according to Statistics Canada 2025. Toronto-specific intimate partner homicide counts are not disaggregated from Ontario-wide figures in the Statistics Canada Homicide Survey; city-level femicide data is compiled separately by advocacy organizations and is not yet part of the TPS annual IPV report.

Why most incidents go unreported — the under-reporting gap

The 18,122 incidents recorded by Toronto Police in 2024 almost certainly represent a fraction of actual domestic abuse in the city. The evidence base for non-reporting is drawn from Statistics Canada’s self-reported victimization surveys — the General Social Survey on Victimization — which ask respondents directly about experiences regardless of whether they were reported to police.

As of Statistics Canada’s 2019 General Social Survey (published October 2021), 80 percent of spousal violence in Canada was never reported to police — only 19 percent of victims reported their victimization, down from 28 percent in 1999. Women reported at higher rates than men (22 percent vs. 14 percent), but female reporting also fell sharply from 38 percent in 1999, according to Statistics Canada 2021.

Self-reported spousal violence prevalence in Canada has also fallen substantially — from 7.5 percent of Canadians in 1999 to 3.5 percent in 2019 — suggesting either a genuine reduction in victimization or increasing reluctance to disclose, according to Statistics Canada 2021. The most common reasons victims gave for not reporting were: “it was a private or personal matter handled informally” (68 percent), “the incident was minor and not worth reporting” (61 percent), and “no one was harmed” (55 percent), per Statistics Canada 2021.

These structural reasons — privacy, minimization, normalization — are reinforced by practical barriers: fear of escalation, economic dependency, immigration status concerns, and the complexity of separating from a partner who controls finances or housing. For Toronto residents in high-rate neighbourhoods like Weston or Black Creek, these barriers likely help explain why police-recorded rates, while among the city’s highest, still represent only a portion of actual incidents.

What this means for Toronto residents and families

The data across the preceding sections points to several practical implications for people living and working in Toronto.

• Domestic violence reaches the workplace. Canadian employers lose approximately $77.9 million annually as a direct result of domestic violence spillover into the workplace, according to a pan-Canadian survey of 8,429 workers published in the International Journal of Workplace Health Management 2016. Of workers who have experienced domestic violence, 82 percent say it negatively affected their work performance, 54 percent reported the violence continued at or near the workplace via stalking or harassing calls, and 39 percent took time off work as a direct result. These figures are from a 2013–2014 survey and remain the most recent pan-Canadian workplace-impact estimate.
• Physical injury is common. As of Statistics Canada’s 2019 General Social Survey, 33 percent of all victims who experienced spousal violence 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), per Statistics Canada 2021.
• Separation does not end the risk. As of the 2019 GSS, 45 percent of victims abused by a former spouse reported that violence continued after separation. Incidents during and immediately after separation are a recognized escalation point — which is why safety planning typically intensifies rather than relaxes at the point of leaving.
• Geographic concentration matters for service planning. The five highest-rate Toronto neighbourhoods are all in the city’s west end, clustered within police divisions 11, 12, 22, and 31. Families or employers in these areas face disproportionate exposure to IPV compared to the city average and to the provincial baseline.

As licensed PIs operating across the GTA, we see the practical consequences of domestic abuse in 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 patterns the data describes match what we observe: incidents are frequently ongoing and escalating before anyone outside the household takes action, and early documentation of patterns — dates, locations, incident types — is consistently more useful to counsel than a single after-the-fact account.

Toronto residents who need confidential documentation of domestic violence patterns can reach our team at +1 (888) 680-0036 — Licensed · Insured · Bonded. Our domestic violence investigations service is specifically designed to document abuse patterns in a way that supports protective orders, custody applications, and workplace-safety referrals. For the national and provincial context behind these Toronto figures, visit our abuse research hub.