A Retrospective Overview of Advances in Data on Victims of Crime in Canada

By Kathy AuCoin, Retired from the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics, Statistics Canada

Over the past 25 years, significant advances have been made in collecting and analyzing national-level data on victims of crime in Canada. These improvements have not only enhanced our understanding of victimization, they have also helped shape evidence-based policy development and informed how support services for victims were designed and delivered. As a result, they have helped to facilitate a more victim-centred justice system. Some of this work was funded through the Federal Victims Strategy (originally the Victims of Crime Initiative) and responded directly to the need for better national victims’ data. In this article, I will outline several of the key data instruments that have contributed to the growth and evolution of victim-focused research; as space is limited, however, there are, I am certain, some advances I may have omitted.

Early Data Challenges: Limited Coverage and Static Analysis

In the early 2000s, when I started my career as an analyst at the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics (CCJCSS) at Statistics Canada, victim data did exist; however, their availability and coverage were limited, making this work challenging. My first analytical contributions at the CCJCSS included a couple of chapters for the annual report, “Family Violence in Canada: A Statistical Profile.” These chapters focused on family violence against seniors, and children and youth, and included only a limited number of static tables and charts, that is, fixed tables covering a small number of variables. The data highlighted in these tables and charts were derived from a small subset of police services, mostly from urban areas, that were reporting on just over half of police-reported crime in Canada.

These services had adapted their records management systems to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Survey’s version 2.0, which enabled them to extract microdata on criminal incidents, including detailed information on the characteristics of the victim and accused person.

However, the incomplete coverage meant that policy makers and researchers could see only a fragment of the broader picture of victimization across Canada: the data, and its analysis, often did not include rural areas, Indigenous communities, and smaller jurisdictions. This resulted in gaps in understanding the unique challenges of victims in these regions. In addition, though the reports attempted to provide trend analysis, they were limited to seven years of police data.

Transformations in Police-Reported Data

Twenty-five years later, the scope and quality of police-reported crime data in Canada has improved dramatically. Police-reported data collected through the UCR Survey now cover 99 percent of the population and provide far more insight into police-reported crime trends across provinces, territories, and urban and rural communities. Today, family-violence-related data tables and charts are released annually, and are much more detailed. This enables researchers to analyze the data much more deeply and to understand more broadly the victimization perpetrated both within and outside of the family. These downloadable tables can be accessed through Statistics Canada’s Common Output Data Repository (CODR) and allow the end user to customize the victim data to include several variables, including age and gender, accused–victim relationship, type of violation, and location.

The tables include several years of data about victims of all forms of violent crime (going back to 2009) and whether the crime was committed by a family member or not (The Daily – Trends in police-reported family violence and intimate partner violence in Canada, 2023).

In addition to better coverage, the UCR Survey is continually being revised to include new Criminal Code violations to track emerging crimes, such as hate crimes, human trafficking, and cybercrimes. For cybercrimes specifically, knowing whether these incidents were facilitated by some form of digital technology is crucial in understanding trends related to for example, online harassment, fraud, extortion, and online child sexual exploitation; understanding these trends is critical in developing prevention programs. Adding both the method of perpetrating a crime and the types of crime committed helps us to understand the evolving and emerging forms of victimization.

Victim-Centric Changes in Reporting and Tracking

One of the most significant changes to the UCR Survey in recent years has been the shift toward a victim-centred approach in reporting and tracking crime. In 2018, clearance status classifications for offences were updated to ensure that victims of violence were counted even if no accused was identified or there was insufficient evidence to proceed. Previously, these incidents might have been classified as "unfounded" by police and not included in the official statistics. This effectively omitted a victim’s experience from official statistics. Following this change, the default position was for police to record criminal incidents as founded–that is, the reported incidents had in fact occurred–unless there was credible evidence to demonstrate that the incidents had not taken place. This shift to a more victim-centred approach in monitoring crime explicitly recognizes the validity of third-party reporting. Finally, this change is particularly relevant to the way reported incidents of sexual assault are treated by police because of the challenges that often exist in obtaining evidence for this type of crime.

Advances in Data Linkages

Another key improvement in victim data has been the introduction of data linkage techniques of administrative data sets. By linking UCR Survey records, it is now possible to explore patterns of repeat victimization and analyze how early-life victimization may later intersect with police involvement as a victim or accused. This involves extracting a subset of victim records from the police files and tracking whether these victims appear in later years–either as a victim or as an accused. This capability allows researchers deeper insights into the cyclical nature of victimization and the long-term impacts crime has on individuals. Work has been ongoing to create this victim-focused linked data file, with reports to be released next year.

In addition to linking UCR Survey files to explore repeat victimization, police data have been linked to court records to understand how various criminal incidents are processed through the Canadian courts. This type of linkage was used in a series of analytical reports looking at sexual assault incidents (pre- and post- #METOO), homicides involving Indigenous women, and gender-related homicides of women and girls. Quantifying court outcomes of various violent crimes helps to identify strengths, gaps, and areas for improvement in how the justice system handles these crimes.

Finally, another major advance that relies on existing administrative data is through the use of a social data record linkage environment (SDLE) that was introduced at Statistics Canada in 2011. The SDLE expands the potential of integrating data sets across multiple domains such as health, education, income, and victim files. From a victim research perspective, this framework has the potential to fill numerous data gaps–for example, exploring the long-term health effects of being a crime victim, or investigating whether victims experience income loss, job instability, or educational setbacks after they have been victimized. To date, analytical reports linking justice data within the SDLE framework have focused on offenders; in the coming years, however, reports looking at victims will be produced.

Growth of Victimization Surveys

Beyond improvements to police-reported data, over the past two decades victimization surveys have also grown significantly, both in the number of instruments as well as the number of questions being asked. These surveys provide essential insights into crimes and broader victim experiences, regardless of whether they reached the criminal threshold or were reported to police. The General Social Survey (GSS) on Canadians’ Safety (victimization) remains a cornerstone of this effort. It has captured experiences of criminal victimization over the past 12 months and spousal violence over the past five years regardless of whether the incident was reported to the police.

Over time, the GSS on victimization has improved on several fronts after including the territories in 2009, enabling their estimates of self-reported victimization to be published for the first time. Importantly, funding from the Federal Victims Strategy permitted territorial respondents to complete their interviews in person, improving the representativeness of the final sample in 2009. In addition, the GSS sample size has also increased in some cycles. This helped to produce a more detailed and granular analysis from what was released in the early 2000s. Because the GSS is collected every five years, it has been adapted between cycles to capture data on emerging issues. These include child maltreatment, fraud, dating violence, criminal harassment, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Lastly, some of the questions about core violent victimization questions posed on the GSS to capture physical and sexual violence have been integrated into other survey instruments that target specific populations. To date, the Canadian Survey on Disability, the Indigenous Peoples Survey, and the Canadian Mental Health Survey have, at one time or another, included victimization questions, offering insights into the unique experiences of these marginalized groups.

Gender Based Violence Data

The collection of data on gender-based violence represents another major milestone in the advances in victim data. The Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces (SSPPS), a new victimization survey first in the field in 2018, delves into various forms of gender-based violence, including those that do not meet the threshold of criminal acts but still profoundly impact victims. By exploring both criminal and non-criminal acts, this survey helps uncover the broader societal impacts of violence rooted in gender discrimination, providing essential data to inform program and policy development, including prevention efforts. Through this survey instrument, multiple reports exploring people’s experiences of victimization during childhood, of intimate partner violence experienced by young women, women with disabilities, and sexual minority women and men, have been published

Increasing Access to Victim Data Through the Research Data Centres

Increased access to victim data has also improved significantly over the past 25 years. Through Statistics Canada’s Research Data Centres (RDCs), academics, researchers, and students have access to a wide range of anonymized, detailed microdata not available in public use files. These datasets cover areas such as health, education, labour, and crime. RDCs are equipped with stringent security measures to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the data. This makes it possible to analyze sensitive data sets that would otherwise not be available to researchers. The RDCs contain data from the UCR Survey, the Homicide Survey, and multiple cycles of the GSS that have been accessed by countless researchers. This greater access has led to increased innovation in research and collaboration and has informed and improved service delivery for victims.

Persistent Data Gaps in Victim Services

While there have been significant improvements on data related to victims of crime, some persistent gaps remain. No comprehensive national picture is available of how victims access services and how the justice system responds to their needs. Work done over the past decade to resolve this issue has met with little success. Starting in 2015, research exploring how to systematically collect victim services data from victim services agencies was undertaken. This project concluded that collecting standardized and robust data from agencies was not viable because of the vast differences in the delivery models between jurisdictions. As a result, a standard reporting mechanism could not be created.

Statistics Canada worked with provincial and territorial directors of victim services over several years to develop standard definitions of a victim and to determine the key variables to be collected to fill data gaps in providing victim services. The first phase of the project involved detailed consultations with PT directors of victim services which then fed into the development of a pilot survey. Statistics Canada collected the pilot Canadian Victim Services Indicators (CVSI) survey as a test of what was viable in the jurisdictions.

Through this data collection pilot, numerous challenges prevented Statistics Canada from publishing national counts of the victims who were served. Provincial and territorial results could be published (Victims of police-reported violent crime in Canada: National, provincial and territorial fact sheets, 2016), but comparisons between jurisdictions could not be made because of differences in definitions, how services were counted, and how information on case and victim characteristics was defined (for additional details, please refer to 2016 Canadian Victim Services Indicators: Pilot survey evaluation and recommendations).

More recently, a sub-committee of provincial, territorial, and federal representatives from the FPT Working Group on Victims of Crime has been struck to continue to explore solutions to the numerous challenges of collecting national counts of victims served. Under the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights, it is essential to have a quantifiable measure of how the criminal justice system is serving victims. However, providing victim services is a provincial and territorial responsibility and victim services models vary significantly across the country. It is thus unlikely that a national standard measure can be attained under the current framework.

Concluding Thoughts

The advances in victim data over the past two decades have been transformative. Improved police-reported data, expanded victimization surveys, and innovations in data linkage have all enhanced victim-focused research in Canada.

Looking ahead, the UCR will be expanding data collection on ethnicity of victims and offenders addressing a critical gap in disaggregated data and shedding further light on people’s diverse experiences of victimization.

While challenges remain, particularly the capacity to collect data on national victim services, it is essential to leverage the progress made. As Hans Rosling, co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation, wisely stated:

"Don’t let the gap between what you know and what you don’t know paralyze you. Use the data you have to start the journey toward understanding."