The incidence of police contact for intimate partner violence in three Canadian regions

Abstract

Intimate partner violence (IPV) places high demands on police and is the most frequent type of violent offending reported to the police in Canada. Police responses are often guided by actuarial risk tools, such as the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA), which provide estimates of recidivism rates associated with specific scores. The interpretation of these case-specific recidivism rates should be guided by the base rate of IPV perpetration in the general population. Accordingly, this study examined officially reported IPV base rates in three Canadian provinces from 2016 to 2018, the settings used for updating the ODARA norms. The overall incidence of perpetration of IPV was 200 per 100,000 (1 out of 500 per year), with substantially higher rates for men against women (304 per 100,000) than for women against men (75 per 100,000). Perpetration against same-gender victims was rare (11 per 100,000 for men to men; 6 per 100,000 for women to women), although these estimates did not control for the proportion of the population who were in same-sex relationships. Regional differences were observed, with lower overall rates in Atlantic Canada than in Alberta and Ontario and relatively high rates of women as perpetrators in Ontario. All population rates were lower than the lowest rates estimated by the 2021 ODARA norms. We recommend that local IPV rates be used to evaluate the effectiveness of public protection policies.