Issue brief : Dossier d'information : la violence à caractère sexuel faite aux femmes au Canada

Mary Clare Kennedy Lynne Belle-Isle This Issue Brief was commissioned by the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Senior Officials for the Status of Women The ideas and opinions in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Governments. [...] This includes a discussion of some of the challenges associated with measuring the prevalence of sexual violence, as well as some of the broader historical, political, and social processes that contribute to sexual violence and shape public understanding of the problem. [...] Given the breadth of experiences that fall under the category of sexual violence, it is important to outline some of the challenges in determining the incidence and prevalence of the problem, and the consequences for women. [...] An important reason why national and provincial sexual violence statistics do not capture the full extent of the pervasiveness of sexual violence is because the two primary national data sources – the General Social Survey (GSS) and the Uniform Crime Reporting survey (UCR) – are limited to “those acts that reach the criminal threshold” (Sinha, 2013:4) as outlined in the Criminal Code of Canada (CC [...] To date, much of the research on this issue has looked at sexual violence within intimate partner contexts, but more focus is required on the roles of support persons, health professionals and caregivers, as they may be both more likely to be perpetrators of violence and key sources of support in justice processes and in the longer term process of living with the effects of violence (Odette, 2012;