Building Knowledge

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice Canada.

June 2013

Building Knowledge Issue 4 – Child and Youth Victims of Assault

In this issue of Building Knowledge, police-reported assaults against child and youth victims are explored. Police-reported assaults refer to all substantiated assaults reported to the police; these are captured in the Incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR2) through Statistics Canada. There are three main types of assault captured in the UCR2: Assault (Level 1) (common assault), Assault with a Weapon or Causing Bodily Harm (Level 2), and Aggravated Assault (Level 3). For the purposes of this issue, these three types of assault are combined to create a total number of child and youth victims of assault broken down by age and gender. These assaults could have been perpetrated by youth or adult perpetrators.

As can be seen in the figure below, in 2011, the number of child and youth victims of assault that were reported to the police generally increased as children and youth became older. For both males and females, the frequency of victimization peaked at age 17. These data also indicate that at every age, a higher number of males were the victims of police-reported assault in comparison to females.

In addition, although the three types of assault are combined here, at every age and for both males and females, common assault accounted for the largest percentage of all assault types (approximately 78%).

Figure 1: Number of victims of police-reported assaults against children and youth (0-17) by age and gender of victim, 2011

Text equivalent of Figure 1 below

Figure 1 - Text equivalent

A vertical bar chart shows the number of victims of police-reported assault, male and female, for ages 0-17 years in the year 2011. The three main types of assault collected by the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (Assault (Level 1), Assault with a Weapon or Causing Bodily Harm (Level 2), and Aggravated Assault (Level 3) are combined to create a total number of child and youth victims of assault broken down by age and gender.

The Y axis is measured in number of victims and increases in increments of 500, from 0 up to 3,500. The X axis lists the age by year from 0 to 17. The number of male victims is the first bar for each age, and the number of female victims is the second bar.

At age 0, there were 263 male and 211 female victims; at age 1, there were 112 male victims and 87 female victims; age 2, there were 183 male victims and 139 female victims; age 3, there were 220 male victims and 157female victims; age 4, 268 male victims and 172 female victims; age 5, there were 282 male victims and 203 female victims; age 6, there were 375 male victims and 198 female victims; age 7, there were 427 male victims and 248 female victims; age 8, there were 537 male victims and 282 female victims; age 9, there were 702 male victims and 318 female victims; age 10, there were 845 male victims and 430 female victims; age 11, there were 1,156 male victims and 580 female victims; age 12, there were 1,543 male victims and 880 female victims; age 13, there were 1,954 male victims and 1,409 female victims; age 14, 2,430 male victims and 1,892 female victims; age 15, there were 2,867 male victims and 2,421 female victims; age 16, there were 3,005 male victims and 2,821 female victims and at age 17, there were 3,324 male victims and 3,148 female victims.

Source: Incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey 2011