Eligibility

Victim services in Canada are primarily delivered by provinces and territories, with programs developed in response to jurisdiction-specific needs, legislation, and resources, and generally organized around supporting individuals in the aftermath of specific criminal incidents. While broader legal frameworks such as the Criminal Code of Canada and the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights help guide the treatment of victims within the justice system, they do not govern the administration of victim services, which varies across jurisdictions.

In addition to varying eligibility and intake processes, victim services (https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/jr/vsc-savc/index.html) in Canada are typically structured around models such as court-based, police-based, system-based, and community-based approaches that emphasize incident-based and individually focused approaches to victimization (Department of Justice Canada, 2024). However, the experiences of Black people impacted by gun violence and those bereaved by the homicide of a family member or friend often encompass collective, chronic, and racialized forms of harm, including repeated exposure to violent injury and death, community violence, and systemic discrimination (Sharpe, 2015). Sharpe et al. (2025) found that both populations navigate relentless traumatic injury, yet these forms of trauma can fall outside traditional eligibility categories where those categories are more narrowly tied to formally reported criminal incidents. As a result, community-based programming such as collective healing circles, community prevention work, and trauma-informed supports for neighbourhoods affected by recurring gun violence and serial homicides have, in some funding contexts, experienced challenges accessing federal support despite directly addressing what survivors identify as necessary for healing. It bears noting that some federal programs have supported Black-led community-based organizations without requiring proof of a reported crime, representing meaningful progress in aligning funding eligibility with the realities of Black survivors. Certain eligibility frameworks, nevertheless, continue to structurally exclude the very modalities of support most aligned with the needs of both Black gun violence survivors and homicide-bereaved families and friends. This underlines the importance of how eligibility criteria are designed across federal and provincial programs. The gaps in victim services operate with particular force for survivors whose identities place them at multiple intersections of disadvantage. Black women, Black youth, and Black survivors with precarious immigration status are among those most likely to fall outside narrow eligibility criteria, not because their harm is less severe, but because the frameworks were not designed with their realities in mind (Deshman, 2009; Sharpe, 2015; Maynard, 2025). Research documents a pattern in which Black youth who witness the shooting of a peer do not qualify as direct victims under incident-based eligibility frameworks despite experiencing profound trauma, while their well-founded fear of criminalization during any police encounter forecloses the formal report on which eligibility itself depends (Sharpe, 2015; Clark, 2025).