Introduction

Every homicide leaves behind more than the immediate loss of a life. It leaves behind parents who will never recover from burying a child, siblings who carry grief into every room they enter, friends who witnessed violence they cannot unsee, and entire neighbourhoods that absorb loss upon loss with little institutional recognition of what that accumulation costs. In Black communities across Canada, these losses occur with devastating frequency. Alongside them, thousands more survivors live with the physical, psychological, and social consequences of gun violence that did not claim their lives but permanently altered them. Together, those surviving the homicide of a loved one and those living in the aftermath of gun violence form the human centre of this discussion paper, and it is their experiences, their needs, and their resilience that must anchor any credible policy and service response.

This paper is written for policymakers shaping the legal and funding frameworks that govern victim services, and the service providers on the front lines who receive survivors at their most vulnerable state. Policymakers and service providers alike are positioned to make a profound difference in the lives of Black survivors of homicide victims and gun violence. For the purposes of this paper, victim services refer to the range of supports available to individuals harmed by homicide and gun violence, including government-funded programs administered at the provincial and territorial level, police and court-based services that provide information and assistance throughout the criminal justice process, and community-based organizations that offer culturally grounded care, advocacy, and practical support outside formal institutional settings. Provincial and territorial victim compensation programs, which provide financial assistance to eligible victims of violent crime, are also included within this framework. Because service models, eligibility criteria, and funding structures differ significantly across jurisdictions, the barriers and gaps identified throughout this paper reflect patterns documented across multiple contexts rather than conditions specific to any single province or territory.

Black communities in Canada experience multiple and intersecting forms of victimization, including intimate partner violence, sexual violence, hate crime, and state-based harm. This paper, however, focuses specifically on homicide and gun violence: forms of harm that claim lives with finality and wound others in ways that are often invisible to the systems meant to serve them. Families bereaved by homicide face a form of violent loss distinct from other bereavement, marked by trauma, sudden rupture, and a justice process that can extend and compound their pain for years. Survivors of gun violence carry physical injuries, chronic trauma, and disrupted life trajectories that rarely receive the sustained, specialized support they require. Both groups navigate their experiences within a broader context of structural inequality. In 2022, Black people represented 25% of all firearm homicide victims in Canada despite comprising approximately 4% of the population (Perreault, 2024), reflecting not only a crisis of violence but a crisis of recognition and response. These disparities are not experienced uniformly. Gender, age, immigration status, disability, and sexual orientation each shape how Black survivors of gun violence and those bereaved by homicide encounter violence and navigate the systems meant to support them; however, disaggregated data capturing these intersecting dimensions remains severely limited in the Canadian context (Sharpe et al., 2025; Jeffers, 2023). Research documents, for example, that Black mothers bereaved by homicide navigate grief not only as Black people in a system that historically discounts Black loss, but as women whose emotional responses are frequently pathologized, and in some cases as immigrants whose precarious status shapes every institutional encounter as a potential site of risk (Sharpe, Bailey, et al., 2024; Maynard, 2025; Deshman, 2009).

The conditions shaping these outcomes are identifiable and addressable. They reflect the accumulated effects of historical processes, structural inequalities, and institutional practices that have influenced where violence is concentrated, who receives protection, and whose losses are recognized as deserving of redress. From the legacies of slavery and spatial dispossession to the chronic underfunding of Black-led organizations and the limited availability of race-disaggregated victim data, the determinants of disproportionate harm are systemic in origin and require responses equally systemic in design. The paper begins with the historical foundations of anti-Black victimization in Canada, then examines contemporary patterns of homicide and gun violence, systemic barriers to victim services, data limitations, post-victimization experiences within the criminal justice system, and community-led resilience and innovation. It concludes with concrete implications for policy, research, and data development.

Canada is at a meaningful moment of opportunity. The development of Canada’s Black Justice Strategy (CBJS) (https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/cbjs-scjn/index.html), the expansion of race-based data collection, and growing institutional recognition of anti-Black racism reflect genuine commitment to addressing longstanding inequities. The lives at the centre of this paper are not abstractions, they are people who lost someone they loved to violence, and people who survived violence but were left to rebuild without adequate support. Informed, coordinated, and well-resourced policy and service responses have the power to better recognize their experiences, address their needs, and ultimately contribute to a future in which fewer Black families and communities are called upon to endure such losses at all.