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A new report is shining a light on the homicide rates for women and girls across Canada, and their numbers show Saskatchewan’s femicide rate is above the national average.
#CallItFemicide, the first annual report from the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability, identified 148 incidents of femicide across the country in 2018. When you average the data, that means a woman or girl was killed in Canada roughly every 2.5 days. The observatory defined femicide as “the killing of women and girls primarily, but not exclusively, by men.”
According to the Jan. 30 report, Saskatchewan saw just six incidents of femicide in 2018 but that was enough to push the provincial femicide rate up to 1.04 deaths per 100,000 women and girls. That’s higher than the national average, which the report placed at 0.94 deaths per 100,000.
The highest femicide rate was found in Nunavut, where four cases pushed the sparsely-populated territory’s rate up to 21.85 deaths per 100,000 women and girls. Québec had the lowest rate at 0.38 per 100,000, followed by British Columbia at 0.45.
Crystal Giesbrecht, a Saskatchewan-based research director who serves on the observatory’s expert advisory panel, said Saskatchewan’s above-average rate could be partially explained by the province’s high number of rural residents. The observatory’s report showed rural areas were far more risky for women than urban centres.
“One of the significant findings was that 34 per cent of women and girls who were killed were living in a rural area, while only 16 per cent of all Canadians live rurally,” Giesbrecht said.
Giesbrecht, who works in transitional housing, said geographic isolation and a lack of available resources could help explain why women were at higher risk in rural areas. Transportation and other barriers to relocation likely also played a role in the above-average rural femicide rates, she said.
Indigenous women and girls were also overrepresented in the report’s data. While Indigenous women and girls comprise only five per cent of the country’s population, the report found they accounted for 36 per cent of all the Canadian femicides in 2018.
“There’s actually another four per cent who may have been [Indigenous],” Giesbrecht added, “but we just don’t have enough information at this time to confirm that.”
Although Saskatchewan’s femicide rate was higher the national average, it does appear to be trending downward. According to the observatory, the femicide rate in Saskatchewan was 1.44 between 2001 and 2015.
While Giesbrecht said that was encouraging, she said more analysis is needed before they could safely say the provincial rate was trending downward.
“I hope that we’re making progress,” Giesbrecht said. “What the observatory will do is continue to track data. There are some cases from 2018 where women are missing or where it’s a suspicious death but there isn’t an accused or there hasn’t been a resolution in the case to date, so those numbers could change a little bit.”
Giesbrecht said the report is a valuable resource not only for bringing the nation’s femicide rate into the public eye but also for determining where support services and other resources should be allocated in the future.