Violence and Aboriginal Women

Question

I have a graduate student interested in studying Aboriginal women's experience of violence.  We found this report --

Addressing violence against Aboriginal Women, the Elderly and Children from July 2008, which makes some claims about incidence of violence against Aboriginal women, which it footnotes to:

Measuring Violence Against Women: Statistical Trends.

This contains the reference:
"For the first time, residents of the three territories (Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut) were interviewed for the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS) as part of a pilot test and results show that women who live in the territories also experience higher levels of violence."

However, when I search variables in the 2004 GSS, there is no indicator with "aboriginal" as a category, nor is there any "territorial data" at all.

Is there some way of acquiring the survey data that has been collected?

Answer

An analyst in the author division explained that the aboriginal variable was suppressed on the public use microdata file in order to guard against disclosure.  The analyst went on to explain that the data is not even available in the RDCs:

"The data for the territories is not available in the RDCs.  Due to concerns about data quality (which are explained in the attached report), the microdata are not available to researchers outside of the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics who published the report.  We are trying again in the territories for the current GSS (2009) on Victimization, hoping that the improved methods we are using will yield better quality results that could be made available to researchers.  They will not be available until summer 2010 though."

Crime Victim Data Question

Question

A student here is working with some crime data and would like to know whether, for the UCR, for detailed offences (we're just looking at sexual assault), if it is possible to distinguish between male and female respondents. That is, we only want to know how many women were sexually assaulted, specifically in 1993 and 2004. It doesn't appear that it is possible to determine this, but we wanted to be sure. We are aware that there is the VAWS and the GSS Cycles where we can tell (and in fact, we're using this data as well).

Answer

You are correct. CCJS has confirmed that it won't be possible to use the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR) to determine how many victims of sexual assaults were women between 1993 and 2004. There is some data on victims of crime in the UCR2 Incident Based Survey (a version of the UCR that was introduced in 1988 and that operates simultaneously with the UCR Aggregate version of the survey) but there weren't enough police forces responding to the UCR2 between 1993 and 2004 for it to provide the data your student needs. The data it contains for this period is from a limited number of police forces.

(On a more general note, there is an interesting description of the UCRs design in the IMDB under
http://www.statcan.ca/cgi-bin/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=3302&lang=en&db=IMDB&dbg=f&adm=8&dis=2)

Sexual Assault Data

Question

A student needs data for the last 10 yrs, for all cases of rape reported, the day and the time of the incidence.

I've looked at Crime Statistics in Canada (2006) and am wondering if I can get this information from the incident-based microdata version of the UCR survey.

Do we have access to this version of the UCR survey through DLI ?

Answer

We have Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR) data on sexual assault offences for the last 10 years in the DLI collection but these data don't include information about the day or time of the assaults.

When I asked the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics about your request, they explained that there were changes to the Criminal Code of Canada in 1983 which removed rape and introduced a three tiered structure of sexual assault offences. So from 1983 onwards, the UCR provides data on sexual assault offences levels I, II and II. Our contact described the three levels as follows: "'Sexual Assault' offences, Level I (sexual assault - the most minor level), Level II (sexual assault with a weapon - serious injury to victim) and Level III (aggravated sexual assault - grievous injury to the victim)".

A table can be created by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics using UCR data that details the number of incidents and rate per 100 000 population of sexual assault offences (Level I, II and III) in Canada from 1996 to 2006.

The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics told me that they might be able to produce more detailed tables on sexual assault offences if you placed a custom request but this would be a fee based service as the tables don't exist as a standard product. The data in these tables would probably start in 1998, might specify if assaults occurred in the am or pm and wouldn't contain data from all police forces across Canada. But, as I mentioned above, these tables would only be available as a custom service for a fee.