Domestic Violence Facts

Domestic Violence or Intimate Partner Abuse is also called family violence and abuse. Men, women and children are at risk.

Child abuse can be physical violence, sexual abuse, but the most common is child neglect. Children are more at risk, statistically in broken families, in sole custody and in unmarried couple families.

What is spousal abuse?

Spousal abuse refers to the violence or mistreatment that a woman or a man may be experiencing at the hands of a marital, common-law or same-sex partner. Spousal abuse may happen at any time during a relationship, including while it is breaking down, or after it has ended.

There are many different forms of spousal abuse such as:
Physical abuse
Sexual abuse and exploitation
Emotional abuse
Economic or financial abuse
Spiritual abuse

How widespread is spousal abuse in Canada?

The most complete information about the extent of spousal abuse in Canada comes from the 1999 General Social Survey on Victimization (GSS). This survey asked almost 26,000 women and men in Canada about their experiences of abuse including experiences of violence and emotional abuse in their current or previous marriages and common law partnerships. According to the GSS, women and men experience similar rates of both violence and emotional abuse in their relationships.

These statistics were echoed in the 2004 GSS which indicates that in Canada, physical aggression on the part of a current or previous spouse/partner was reported by men and women in fairly similar proportions.

Violence against women tends to be more severe.

What Factors contribute to spousal abuse?

There is no single, definitive ‘cause’ of spousal abuse, and anyone – regardless of gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, cultural identity, socioeconomic status, occupation, religion, sexual orientation, physical or mental abilities or personality – may be vulnerable to being abused.

Spousal abuse is a complex problem, and there may be many different contributing factors – a the individual, relationship and societal level. Many experts, however, believe that spousal abuse is link to inequalities among people in our society and to power imbalances in relationships.

Factors that increase risk

Although they are not direct ‘causes’ of abuse, recent statistics indicate that there are a number of factors that alone, or in combination, are associated with an increased risk of abuse. For example, some of the risk factors, for both men and women, include:
• Being a young person
• Living in a common law relationship
• Having a partner who periodically drinks heavily
• Emotional abuse in the relationship ( an important predictor for physical violence )
• Marital separation

What are the consequences of spousal abuse?

Besides the obvious physical and emotional harm done to the victim, there are also societal consequences to continued abuse:

Spousal abuse has enormous economic implications for Canadian society. The first research study to estimate the costs of various forms of violence against women, including woman abuse in intimate relationships, found that this problem costs Canadian society an estimated $4.2 billion per year in social services, education, criminal justice, labour, employment, health and medical costs. Criminal justice costs alone total an estimated $871,908,583. Typically these costs ignore the costs of male victims, child victims, men’s defense against false accusations and the impact on family courts.

How does this relate to equal parenting?

The fundamental point in all family violence research is that men and women are equally capable of perpetuating violence, and it is wrong to view this society problem through a stereotyping lens.

Studies suggest that the majority of unsubstantiated family violence cases occur during periods of divorce. This, of course, is not to say that family violence does not exist outside of family separation.

Equal parenting serves to inform the domestic violence debate. Just as it is statistically uncontested that married families are the safest for adults and children alike, it stands to reason that a continuing relationship with both parents post-divorce is likely to constitute the safest environment after divorce.

In point of fact, equal parenting has been shown to reduce domestic violence, conflict and false allegations of abuse – largely by placing both parents on a legally equal playing field and removing incentives to use children as bargaining pawns; and while it may be proposed that divorcing parents can’t co-operate well enough to share parenting roles thereby making sole custody the preferred option, research has amply demonstrated that most parents can co-operate well enough to undertake equal parenting, and even the reluctant can be converted to its benefits after attending parenting programs.

Link to CAFE’s billboard campaign on male domestic violence victims