Posted on behalf of the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability
Jenny Wright, Executive Director of the St. John’s Status of Women Council is a member of the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability’s (CFOJA) Expert Advisory Panel. The following report was prepared by the CFOJA and captures data from the first four months of 2018.
Highlights:
So far, in 2018, at least 57 females have been killed in Canada; this is one femicide victim every other day in this country.
Females of any age can be killed because they are female; victims range in age from 2 years to 94 years old.
Females are primarily killed by men with the greatest risk coming from current or former intimate partners; a significant proportion of these women are killed by men they were dating.
Indigenous girls and women experience disproportionate rates of femicide in Canada. At least eight of the 57 victims were Indigenous women. Where information is known, this represents 19
percent of the victims; however, Indigenous peoples account for only four to five percent of the population.
Introduction
The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability (CFOJA) was launched on Dec. 6, 2017. Its overall mandate is to track femicides in this country and to monitor state and social responses to these killings. This is the first report of the CFOJA focusing on the period January 1 to April 30, 2018. Given the recent nature of some of the femicides described below, minimal information is currently available. Information will be updated on an ongoing basis as it is released or becomes available. Data is drawn from media reports at this stage.
The CFOJA defines femicide as the killing of females because they are female primarily, but not exclusively, by men (see www.femicideincanada.ca). International discussions are ongoing about
the parameters that should be used to identify femicide. As such, in line with other countries and for tracking purposes, we count all female victims as femicides until more specific criteria are
agreed upon and/or more detail becomes available about the circumstances of the killing (see http://www.femicideincanada.ca/home/what).
Since the beginning of 2018, at least 57 females have been killed in Canada. This is one femicide victim every other day in this country. We consider this a minimum estimate since it is likely that
some femicides have not yet been reported or discovered, including those that may involve women and girls who have disappeared. In nine of the 57 cases (16%), a perpetrator has not yet been
identified. Two of these nine cases are possible femicide-suicides, four are being investigated as suspicious deaths, and three are recognized as homicide but remain unsolved.
Below, all 57 cases are included when examining the characteristics of the femicide victims. When examining the victim-perpetrator relationship and perpetrator characteristics, only the 48 cases in which a perpetrator has been identified are included. The eight femicide victims killed in Toronto on Monday, April 23, 2018 are included in these data. They, and two male victims, were mowed
down by a man driving a van. It is believed that their deaths were motivated, at least in part, by misogynistic hate. As such, they provide a clear example of the need to label such killings as
femicide – the misogynistic killing of women because they are women. (1)