One-quarter of female victims of gender-related homicide from 2009 to 2022 had at least one prior contact with police as victims of violence during the same period, with an average of three previous contacts, according to new Statistics Canada data.

Among gender-related homicide victims with previous police contact, 49 per cent were “victimized at least once by the same person later accused of their homicide, a proportion at least six times greater than what was found for other homicide victims.”

Eighty-four per cent of these police contacts were for violence “perpetrated by an intimate partner.”

The study defines gender-related homicides of women and girls as those “committed by a man or boy who was an intimate partner or family member of the victim, or who inflicted sexual violence on the victim as part of the homicide, or who killed a victim identified by police as a sex worker.”

Out of the 6,534 homicides evaluated in the study, 69 per cent of homicide victims were men and boys and the remaining 31 per cent were women and girls.

However, of the women and girl victims, more than two-thirds (69 per cent) were killed in a gender-related homicide and one in five (20 per cent) of these gender-related homicide victims were identified as Indigenous by police.

Overall, 357 women and girls who were victims of a gender-related homicide had “at least one prior contact with police as a victim of violence,” equaling 1,075 contacts.

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Nineteen per cent of these women and girls had five or more contacts, accounting for 53 per cent of all prior contacts among victims of gender-related homicide.

Nine per cent of men and boys had five or more contacts, representing 29 per cent of total contacts.

In the vast majority of gender-related homicides (66 per cent), the victims were either spouses or non-spousal intimate partners of the accused killers, according to the data.

That stands in contrast to non-gender-related homicides of men and boys, where roughly 80 per cent had a “non-intimate, non-familial relationship” with their accused killer.

These victims were most often friends with (32 per cent and 34 per cent), acquaintances of (27 per cent and 25 per cent) or strangers to the accused (22 per cent and 19 per cent).

Among Indigenous victims, 65 per cent were killed by an intimate partner and 26 per cent by a family member, and nine per cent of Indigenous women and girls were “killed by an accused with whom they shared a non-intimate, non-familial relationship” compared with seven per cent of overall gender-related homicide victims.

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Indigenous women and girls comprised about five per cent of the total population of women and girls in Canada in 2021, according to the study.

In addition, the median age of Canadian homicide victims was 35 years from 2009 to 2022. However, gender-related homicide victims were older, with a median age of 39 years.

Separate Statistics Canada research uncovered that the average rate of firearm-related intimate partner violence was 31 per cent higher from 2020 to 2024 than from 2015 to 2019 and 58 per cent higher than from 2010 to 2014.

There were 1,096 victims of police-reported intimate partner violence in which a firearm was present during the incident in 2024. In addition, rifles and shotguns were found to be the most common types of firearms present in firearm-related intimate partner violence each year from 2010 to 2019. Since 2020, handguns have been the most common type.

Newfoundland and Labrador became the third province to declare gender-based violence an epidemic on May 27, followed by New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Lela Evans, Newfoundland and Labrador’s minister of women and gender equality, said on May 27 that the declaration acknowledges the urgency of the problem and the need for collective action to prevent it.