Data limitations

The invisibility of Black victimization is shaped in no small part by a fragmented and institutionally cautious approach to collecting and reporting victim-related data disaggregated by race. Canada has struggled for decades to generate nationally comparable data on victims due to provincial-territorial variation in service models, definitions, and reporting systems, with each jurisdiction independently determining who qualifies as a victim and what information is recorded, making cross-jurisdictional analysis difficult (McDonald, 2025). Despite major advances in police-reported and survey-based data, no national dataset captures how victims access services or how their needs are addressed across jurisdictions (AuCoin, 2025). Following the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights in 2015, Statistics Canada’s Canadian Victim Services Indicators Pilot Survey emerged from efforts to assess how victim rights are implemented and measured at a national level. The aim of this pilot survey was to assess the feasibility of creating nationally comparable indicators on victim service use and outcomes. This process, which ran from fall 2015 to 2019, found major challenges related to inconsistent definitions, differences in how data are collected, and variation in service delivery across jurisdictions. A more recent publication on national victims’ data highlights some advances since the pilot but notes that the resource intensive nature of data collection remains a key barrier to producing high quality and consistent data (McDonald, 2026).

Because data collection systems do not disaggregate primary measures by race, ethnicity, or type of violence, Black victims of gun violence, or police violence are not readily identifiable categories in administrative data, leaving the unique patterns of victimization they face statistically obscured. The Statistics Canada Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Survey publicly reports only four high-level clearance categories, omitting case-specific reasons that would reveal systemic failures, and institutions have little incentive to collect or publish data that would highlight their own inadequacies (Office of the Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime, 2025). The forthcoming expansion of UCR data to include ethnicity variables for all police-reported crimes marks an important step forward (Statistics Canada, 2025), as does the CBJS External Steering Group’s recommendation for a unit within Statistics Canada to coordinate a justice system-wide race-based data program (Jeffers, 2023; Owusu-Bempah & Jeffers, 2021). This invisibility is compounded across intersecting identities. Because race-based data is not routinely collected alongside gender, age, disability status, immigration status, or sexual orientation, it is not currently possible to produce reliable demographic breakdowns of how homicide bereavement and gun violence survivorship affect specific subgroups within Black communities in Canada. This gap is itself a policy problem. Disaggregated data that captures the distinct experiences of Black women, Black youth, Black 2SLGBTQ+ individuals, and Black survivors with disabilities is essential for designing services that can reach those who carry the greatest burden (Sharpe et al., 2025; Jeffers, 2023; Owusu-Bempah & Jeffers, 2021). In the absence of such data, patterns of differential access go undetected: whether Black women bereaved by homicide access services at lower rates than Black men, or whether Black survivors with disabilities are systematically excluded by inaccessible intake processes, are questions that current administrative data cannot answer (AuCoin, 2025; Office of the Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime, 2025). These positive indicators must be followed by consistent recording practices, jurisdictional alignment, and a willingness to confront the structural inequities that data will inevitably reveal.