Stats on gender violence lacking: feds

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This article was published 01/09/2016 (3512 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Federal Status of Women Minister Patti Hajdu said a major part of the promised national strategy on gender-based violence will be an updated and comprehensive survey to determine what the problem looks like in Canada.

“There is just this lack of data on what kinds of violence women are experiencing, what kinds of responses they get,” said Hajdu, in an interview Wednesday with the Free Press before a Winnipeg meeting on the strategy.

“The deeper dive on gender-based violence is just not there.”

Hajdu is spending the summer leading consultations with local regional leaders and stakeholders, hoping to produce a report and a plan in 2017.

She said getting more and better data is one of the most frequent discussions at the events she has attended so far.

From university campuses to women’s groups to health professionals, anecdotal evidence suggests women are very unlikely to report assaults.

It’s believed fewer than one in 10 sexual assaults is reported to police and 70 per cent of domestic violence incidents go unreported.

It means statistics available from police do not illustrate the depth of the problem.

Hajdu said 1993 was the last time there was a national survey on the issue.

“That gives you a sense of just how hard it is to even create a baseline and whether what we’re doing will even have an effect,” she said.

Hajdu said her department has been discussing the issue with Statistics Canada as well as other departments to figure out the best way to proceed.

“I can’t say when,” she said.

“We’re still in the listening stage. We know we need to have a more comprehensive approach to data. How that happens is still to be determined but it will be a key feature (of the gender-based violence strategy.)

Nicole Chammartin, executive director of Klinic Community Health Centre and the Sexuality Education Resource Centre in Winnipeg, was among the invitees to the Winnipeg consultation Wednesday.

She said it’s nice to see federal leadership on this issue and developing a national strategy to address gender-based violence will also help at the provincial level.

Chammartin said she would like to see a universal comprehensive sexuality education in Canada.

She noted children get exposed to troubling messages about gender and sexuality at an early age, from movies and television shows and from adults.

“It’s ‘boys don’t cry,’ and ‘boys will be boys,’” she said.

“We start that messaging really young. How do we teach our men and boys that violence isn’t OK?”

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca