It’s Time To Confront Canada’s Intimate Partner Violence Epidemic

Like millions of Canadians, the events of December 6, 1989 are seared into my memory. It’s the day a gunman targeted, shot and killed 14 women and wounded another 14 people at a Montreal university. At the time, I was a 35-year-old mother and law student. Along with many women at my university, I was part of a “No Means No” campaign to raise awareness about sexual assault that fall. It raised the ire of some students, mostly men, who posted signs in residence windows. “No means do it harder,” “No means more beer,” and “No means tie her down” are just a few examples of the misogynist and violent responses to our efforts. 

Thirty-five years later, I am a 70-year-old mother, grandmother and lawyer—and I’ve spent decades working to end violence against women. I’m a writer and educator on the subject, having provided and written several recommendations and toolkits to end this epidemic. But this year on December 6, I find myself wondering why we have accomplished so little since the events at École Polytechnique. 

A friend once said to me of her own experiences working with survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV): “When I started this work, I was sure that once people knew about it, it would end.”

It has not. 

Violence against women, including IPV, not only remains with us but is more serious and more deeply entrenched than it was in 1989. The COVID-19 pandemic opened the curtain on the prevalence of IPV around the world, which increased public awareness, thanks in no small measure to media coverage. But even though risk factors, like stay-at-home orders and reduced capacity at women’s shelters that made more women vulnerable to abuse by their partners, are long behind us, the violence continues. In fact, Statistics Canada found that IPV increased by 13 percent between 2018 and 2023. 

It’s not as though we don’t know what to do. Inquests and annual reports from domestic violence death committees across the country have produced thousands of recommendations for systemic change. Look no further than two recent inquests I participated in: the Culleton, Kuzyk and Warmerdam (CKW) Inquest in Ontario’s rural Renfrew County, which examined the murders of three women who were killed by a man who had had or who sought to have an intimate relationship with each of them, and the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission, which shone a light on the connections between intimate partner violence and mass casualty events.

But there is no legal requirement that any government implement these recommendations. Despite the wisdom they contain and the fact that many of them are repeated time and time again, so often they sit on shelves—or the electronic equivalent—leaving those who developed them wondering why we bothered.

I’d started to think that perhaps IPV is too deeply entrenched, too close to the bone, just too big for people to feel there is any way for them to make a difference. Maybe I’ve been wrong.

One of the themes of my new book, And Sometimes They Kill You: Confronting the Epidemic of Intimate Partner Violence, is that we can’t continue putting band-aids on this epidemic. 

Responding to an all-of-society problem like the war on women—and make no mistake, that’s what we’re talking about—requires an all-of-society approach. That means there is a role for each of us to play. The IPV epidemic often feels overwhelming even to  me, someone who has spent her life working to end IPV; no wonder others may feel there’s no point in doing anything at all.

But I sense a sea change. I’m midway through four weeks of travel across Ontario promoting the book and speaking with groups in cities and communities large and small, and what I am hearing makes me hopeful. 

Admittedly, those who come to my book launches are likely to be concerned about IPV. Nonetheless, a lot of people also want to be part of the solution. I’ve been asked to provide training on how to be an effective advocate, how to engage with the media, how to work with local politicians and how to work collaboratively at the community level. 

It seems as though perhaps we’ve all had enough of women and children being killed, of women staying in relationships where they are being abused because there is nowhere safe for them to go, of women not being believed when they talk about the violence to which they are subjected, of survivors being silenced by publication bans and non-disclosure agreements. It’s just plain enough. 

It also seems that people are tired of waiting for someone else, like the government, to do the right thing. They are ready to do it themselves—in their communities, neighbourhoods, workplaces, schools and religious institutions. That can be anything from talking about violence against women at a book club gathering, to writing a letter to the editor of a local newspaper, or speaking to a local, provincial or federal politician.

Because ending violence against women requires an all-of-society approach, there seems to be no better way than this to move the work along. It’s from the ground up that we will be able to build the revolutionary response we need to end violence against women, which is,undeniably, an epidemic.

Pamela Cross’s new book about the epidemic of intimate partner violence in Canada, And Sometimes They Kill You, is out now.