4. Victim costs

This section uses the General Social Survey (GSS) on Canadians’ Safety (Victimization) to calculate victim costs.Footnote 40 The term “victim” in this report refers to a person aged 15 years and older who has suffered physical or emotional harm, property damage, or economic loss due to a crime under the Criminal Code.

Victims bear the direct effects of crime and incur both tangible and intangible costs. The tangible costs estimated in this study include medical costs, loss of productivity, and other costs (table 11). The traumatic experience of being a victim can cause severe pain and suffering. This study considers pain and suffering as an intangible cost because no financial transaction takes place. Therefore, its “value” is not determined by a market.

This study estimates the pain and suffering for victims of physical assault, robbery, break and enter, sexual assault, and homicide as economic costs. The monetary values of pain and suffering for physical assault and robbery are drawn from McCollister et al. (McCollister, 2010) who use the method developed in Cohen (Cohen, Pain, Suffering, and Jury Awards: A Study of the Cost of Crime to Victims, 1988), using more recent data. Costs associated with break and enter and drawn from Cohen (Cohen, Pain, Suffering, and Jury Awards: A Study of the Cost of Crime to Victims, 1988), with the costs adjusted for inflation.

Calculating the costs associated with sexual assault is more complex. Previous work assigning monetary values to the pain and suffering of sexual assault has distinguished between “rape” and other forms of sexual assault (Dolan, 2005). In Canada, the term “rape” was removed in the 1983 amendments to the Criminal Code.⁠Footnote 41 Today the Criminal Code defines three levels of sexual assault, similar to the three levels of physical assault. Police-reported data and criminal court data therefore report on the number of sexual assaults for levels 1, 2, and 3.Footnote 42 In addition to this challenge, it is well known that sexual assault is underreported to police,Footnote 43 and therefore undercounted in police-reported data and court statistics. Therefore, surveys collecting self-reported data are often thought of as a more suitable method for estimating the prevalence of sexual violence.

In the GSS Canadians’ Safety (Victimization), respondents are asked to self-report experiences of "sexual attacks" and "unwanted sexual touching." This again, does not precisely align with previous work to estimate the economic costs of sexual assault. In this study, a proportion of “sexual attacks” self-reported in the GSS were classified as “rape” and the remaining were classified as “sexual assault.”Footnote 44 As per Dolan et al., higher values of pain and suffering were attributed for victims who were raped compared with victims who were not.

Homicide victims’ loss of life is another significant intangible cost included in victim costs. To calculate this, we adopted the value of a statistical life (VSL) approach from Viscusi (Viscusi, 2008). Viscusi (2008) used the "willingness to pay" or "willingness to accept" method. The willingness to pay method measures how much money a person is willing to pay to reduce the risk of death in some events, activities, or jobs. Stating a monetary amount, it is argued, reveals how much a person values life. For example, Zhang et al. 2012 state (Zhang, Hoddenbagh, McDonald, & Scrim, 2012), “If an individual is willing to pay $500 to eliminate a 0.01% risk of death, the implicit VSL for that person is $500 / 0.01% = $5 million.”

The current report uses more refined methods to estimate intangible costs. It uses the approach and framework developed by Hoddenbagh et al. (Hoddenbagh, Zhang, & McDonald, 2014). Hoddenbagh et al.’s report estimates assault victims’ pain and suffering separately for assault levels 1, 2, and 3. It assigns different values of pain or suffering to victims of each level of assault, because it assumes that victims of a level 3 assault would endure more “pain and suffering” than the victims of level 1 or 2 assaults. In addition, their report uses the number of victims,Footnote 45 not the number of incidents, to estimate intangible costs, counting each victim only once.

Based on the methods developed by Hoddenbagh et al. (Hoddenbagh, Zhang, & McDonald, 2014), we found that tangible victim costs were $13,992,525,789 (table 11), and intangible victim costs were $14,391,475,555 in 2014 (table 11). Overall, estimated victim costs were $28,384,001,344 in 2014. Female victims accounted for 55.5% of the total, male victims 44.5%. This difference was due to a higher violent victimization rate among females in 2014 (Statistics Canada, 2015). According to the 2014 GSS, the rate was 85 violent incidents per 1,000 women compared with 67 incidents per 1,000 men that year. Two factors explain this difference:

Table 11. Victim costs

Table 11. Victim costs
Cost category or items Female victims Male victims Total
Medical costs
Initial health-care $12,077,347 $21,393,516 $33,470,863
Long-term health-care $214,124,156 $58,015,994 $272,140,150
Costs of suicide attempts $8,748,769 $93,664 $8,842,432
Cost of autopsy for homicide victims $163,035 $413,172 $576,207
Total medical costs $235,113,307 $79,916,345 $315,029,652
Lost productivity
Lost current income $145,426,252 $122,469,864 $267,896,115
Lost household service $58,358,519 $25,078,722 $83,437,242
Lost education $3,487,082 $1,607,715 $5,094,797
Lost child-care service $1,123,731 $241,913 $1,365,643
Lost future income $5,692,338,342 $7,124,314,821 $12,816,653,163
Total lost productivity $5,900,733,926 $7,273,713,035 $13,174,446,961
Intangible costs
Cost of pain and suffering $8,204,556,875 $1,955,848,706 $10,160,405,582
Cost of loss of life – homicide $1,197,163,209 $3,033,906,764 $4,231,069,973
Total intangible costs $9,401,720,085 $4,989,755,470 $14,391,475,555
Other costs
Stolen, damaged, or destroyed property $216,685,175 $271,499,249 $488,184,423
Burglar alarm installation $8,565,553 $1,619,831 $10,185,384
Restraining or protective order $2,272,515 $2,406,854 $4,679,369
Total other costs $227,523,242 $275,525,934 $503,049,176
Total victim costs $15,765,090,560 $12,618,910,784 $28,384,001,344