In Canada, intimate partner violence (IPV) is an epidemic. Approximately 44 per cent of women who have been in an intimate relationship — or about 6.2 million women aged 15 and older — have reported experiencing some form of psychological, physical or sexual abuse in a relationship at some point in their lives.
IPV victimization has severe ramifications, including negative effects on health, economic consequences for the victim as well as on societal institutions such as the health-care and legal systems. It also has an impact on children who are exposed to the violence.
The explicit understanding that IPV must be deemed an epidemic follows in part from a 2022 inquest into a triple femicide near Ottawa in 2015 that left Carol Culleton, Anastasia Kuzyk and Nathalie Warmerdam dead at the hands of a man with a long history of intimate partner violence.
