Homicide News in Canada is Good; DV Advocates Glum

The recently released report on homicide in Canada by that nation's official statistics agency shows that Canadians enjoy safety undreamed of by Americans (StatsCan, 10/28/09).  Canadian women in particular are safe.  Indeed, homicides to Canadians who manage to stay out of gangs are vanishingly rare.

The most recent figures are for 2008.  They show that, in a nation of about 34 million, there were a total of 611 homicides, which the Glossary of Terms says corresponds to the statistics in the U.S. on "non-negligent" homicides.  In other words, they're excluding accidental deaths.  That means that, on average, about 1 in 55,000 Canadians was a victim of homicide last year.  That's less than one-third the rate of non-negligent homicide victimization in the United States.  Still, it represented a 2% uptick since 2007.

Some 138 of those 611 victims were gang-related.  Only 24% of victims were women which is the lowest rate of female victimization since 1961.  Homicides by spouses and former spouses totalled 62 with 45 victims being women versus 17 men.  StatsCan doesn't include in its report whether it counts murder by proxy as spousal murder or a "multiple offender" crime as is done in the U.S.  Because wives tend more than husbands to hire out the murder of their spouse, in the States, murders of husbands are often obscured in the "multiple offender" category.

Whatever the case, the spousal homicide rate was the lowest in over 40 years.  Homicides with a female victim dropped by 17 to 146, or 0.87 per 100,000 population.

But domestic violence advocates weren't buying it.  This article quotes Lori Rudniski of the Family Violence Consortium of Manitoba as saying,

"Does it mean domestic violence incidents are down? I don't think so.  At the agency levels, we're seeing more complex needs from the women and the families, (and) we're seeing the impact of longer-term incidents of domestic violence (680 News, 10/28/09)."

That last sentence presumably means something, but neither Ms. Rudniski nor the article explained. 

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