Public Safety: Your Voice, Your Experience

Gender-based violence (GBV) refers to any form of violence that is rooted in power imbalances and enacted based on a person’s gender, gender identity, gender expression, or perceived gender. GBV includes emotional, psychological, physical, sexual, spiritual, economic, and systemic violence. It can occur in private, public, and institutional settings, and often continues across a person’s lifespan.

At BWSS, we understand GBV as a form of structural and systemic violence that disproportionately impacts women, girls, and gender-diverse people. It is not random—it is patterned, predictable, and enabled by patriarchal, colonial, racist, ableist, and capitalist systems.

Expanding the Definition: Violence Against Women

Violence against women (VAW) is a specific form of GBV that targets women and girls because they are women and girls. It includes:

• Intimate partner violence (physical, sexual, psychological, or economic abuse)
• Sexualized violence (assault, harassment, exploitation)
• Femicide (the gender-based killing of women and girls)
• State violence and systemic neglect, including inaction from police, courts, and social services
• Reproductive coercion and forced sterilization
• Child sexual abuse and incest
• Stalking and coercive control
• Cyber violence and image-based abuse
• Forced marriage and human trafficking

Violence against women is not limited to private relationships. It is embedded in social, economic, legal, and political systems that normalize the control and punishment of women’s bodies, choices, and autonomy.

Our “Lifetime Spiral of Gender Violence” model shows how GBV follows women and girls across all stages of life. From childhood to old age, gendered violence manifests through: 

• Early experiences of abuse and neglect in homes and institutions
• Dating violence, harassment, and sexual assault in adolescence
• Reproductive control, IPV, economic abuse, and legal system harm in adulthood
• Caregiver violence, institutional abuse, and poverty in older age 

For many, these experiences are compounded by racism, colonization, transphobia, ableism, and poverty, creating layers of trauma and limited access to support or justice. GBV is not a one-time event—it is a continuum.

While anyone can experience gender-based violence, women and girls are at significantly greater risk, particularly those who face intersecting systems of oppression, including: 

• Girls
• Women
• Indigenous women and girls, due to the legacy of colonization, residential schools, and ongoing state violence
• Black, racialized, and immigrant women, who experience systemic racism and under-protection
• 2SLGBTQIA+ and gender-diverse people, especially trans and Two-Spirit people
• Unhoused and precariously housed women, who lack safe spaces and resources
• Women with disabilities, who face higher rates of violence and often inaccessible supports

A Public Safety Crisis

 At BWSS, we name gender-based violence and violence against women as a public safety crisis—not a private matter. Yet, survivors continue to be left out of public safety planning, overlooked in emergency responses, and underfunded in prevention and support services.

We call for a complete transformation of public safety—one that starts with those who have survived its absence.

Close to half of women have been physically or sexually assaulted in their lifetime

Intimate Partner and Domestic Violence Through the Lifecycle

In Canada, 44% of women or 6.2 million women aged 15 and older have reported some kind of abuse in their intimate partner relationship.

Intimate partner and domestic violence persists and evolves throughout a woman or girl’s life, reflecting broader systems of power and control that disproportionately impact women and girls.

29.8% of women in British Columbia report experiencing physical or sexual assault from an intimate partner since the age of 15 (Statistics Canada)

Some key statistics on gender-based violence in Canada:

• Women are over-represented as victims of gender-based violence, with women in Canada beingsix times more likely than men to have been sexually assaulted by an intimate partner in their lifetime.One-third (33 percent) of women in Canada have been sexually assaulted at some point since age 15, and 45 percent of women in Canada have been physically or sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
• For five consecutive years, rates of reported family violence and intimate partner violence have both been increasing across Canada. In 2021, 79 percent of victims of intimate partner violence were women and girls, and, in the same year, there was an alarming 19 percent increase in intimate partner sexual assaults, compared with 2020.
• Home is often the most dangerous place for women, with 87 percent of gender-related homicides of women and girls occurring at a residence.Between 2011 and 2021, the largest proportion of gender-related attempted murders of women and girls occurred at residential locations, involved the presence of a weapon, and resulted in physical injury.
• Femicide is also on the rise across Canada. Femicide is the most extreme form of violence on the GBV continuum and is defined as the intentional killing of women, girls, and non-binary people explicitly motivated by and because of gender. In 2022, 184women and girls were violently killed, primarily by men. According to the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability, this represents an alarming 27 percent increase when compared to 2019. Over the past five years, over 850 women and girls were killed in Canada. 

That means, on average, at least one woman or girl is killed every two days in Canada is killed due to their gender.

• In the past 11 years, two-thirds (66 percent) of gender-related homicides were perpetrated by an intimate partner, 28 percent by a family member, 5 percent by a friend or acquaintance, and 1 percent by a stranger. In this same time period, the largest proportion of gender-related homicides was by stabbing. In 2021, 90 homicide victims were killed by an intimate partner, of whom 76 percent were women and girls. In the same year, the rate of gender-related homicide was more than 5 times greater in rural areas compared to urban areas.
• Between 2018 and 2022, 850 women and girls were killed across Canada. That means at least one woman or girl was killed every two days. However, femicide is not included in the Canadian Criminal Code (Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability)
• Financial impacts of gender-based violence can include an inability to work and loss of wages, lengthy and costly court battles, loss of housing and property and counselling and health care costs (Province of BC)

https://www.bwss.org/take-action-to-combat-gender-based-violence/