2016 Canadian Victim Services Indicators: Pilot survey evaluation and recommendations

Availability of data by question

Counts of victims by age and sex: Not all jurisdictions were able to provide a breakdown of their counts of victims by age group and sex.

Counts by offence against the victim: Collecting information on the count of victims by criminal offence was more problematic. In most jurisdictions, detailed offence information was unavailable for some proportion of victims. Some jurisdictions only have information on the offence for direct victims. Moreover, many jurisdictions do not capture information in a format that identifies the offences according to the desired classification. In particular, some jurisdictions do not capture detailed offence information for spousal abuse/domestic violence victims or from violence against women programs. This may be particularly pertinent to situations where a single file is managed for a victim of multiple incidents where different offences may be involved.

Caseload measures: Generally speaking, information available on the number and types of services offered or provided to victims varied by jurisdiction and by type of service. Note that 2 jurisdictions were unable to provide any information for this question.

For services related to the CVBR rights, the highest rate of reporting was for those services related to court information and participation. Because many types of direct service are often provided by other organizations such as police or community agencies, especially in jurisdictions with decentralized services, detailed information was not available to respondents or not captured in a way to support extraction.

Comments from respondents on this question also note that where information was provided it was not always complete as it may be from an individual program and therefore not representative of all services provided.

As a result, we chose not to release the information from this question as the data quality in terms of the completeness and comparability of the information provided was inadequate.

Victim Impact Statements/Community Impact Statements: Information on the number of Victim Impact Statements filed was provided by 8 jurisdictions. In addition, one respondent was able to provide information on the number of forms provided (only). Comments from respondents indicate, however, that the counts are highly dependent on the system in place in each jurisdiction for processing victim impact statements. For example, in some jurisdictions, every victim has the opportunity to file a statement, in New Brunswick, however, statements are only prepared at the request of the courts once an offender has pleaded or been found guilty. This means that the information will not be comparable by jurisdiction.

In spite of these differences, it was felt that information on victim impact statements was an important indicator to present. Data on victim impact statements was therefore provided in the publication with clear language and notes explaining what the measure reflected.

Information currently collected by the Integrated Criminal Courts Survey (ICCS):

The Integrated Criminal Court Survey (ICCS) collects information on victim impact statements, restitution orders and testimonial aids as well as referrals to restorative justice directly from the courts. Information on restitution orders is considered reasonably reliable, but not all jurisdictions can provide the amount of restitution ordered. Currently, five (5) jurisdictions are able to provide information on victim impact statements, but the quality of this data needs to be examined. Information on testimonial aids has been requested with the new survey redesign and will be evaluated when it comes available. It is expected that not all jurisdictions will be able to provide this information. Information on referrals to restorative justice is available from Nova Scotia only.

Summary:

The issues identified here do not allow for the production of comparable victim services indicators by jurisdiction. Although the provincial and territorial CVSI respondents have made a serious attempt to work with Statistics Canada to develop standard victim services indicators, the barriers to producing reliable and comparable measures identified here are such that we cannot recommend investing further time and resources in this work.