A woman or girl is killed every 48 hours in Canada as femicide epidemic worsens: report

A new report shows that the rate of homicide for women and girls in Canada, known as “femicide,” is increasing significantly, with data showing that 850 women and girls have been killed in the last five years, equating to a rate of one every 48 hours, reports CTV News.

The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability (CFOJA) released its annual report Thursday which shows a disturbing surge violent deaths of women and girls at the hands of men between 2018 and 2022.

Not all the deaths had identified accused, but of those that were identified, 88 percent of those who were “primary accused” were male. Intimate-partner violence was the most common in these cases, followed by familial femicide and non-intimate femicide.

“A major finding is that the killing of women and girls involving a male accused in Canada increased by 27 percent in 2022 compared to the pre-COVID year, 2019,” reads the report.

The average age of women and girls killed by a male accused was 42 years, but certain age groups were over-represented. For example, women aged 25 to 34 years comprised 21 percent of the victims yet only 14 percent of the general female population, indicating a greater risk of femicide.

The largest portion of male accused were aged 25 to 35 years (23 percent), and male accused had an average age of 37 years.

Advocacy groups are calling for the term femicide to be enshrined in legislation and/or the Criminal Code of Canada.

“We really wanted to address the issue so there would be a better understanding publicly,”  said CFOJA founder Dr. Myrna Dawson in a news release.

Twenty countries already use the term femicide to classify the killing of women and girls by men.

“This is one example of how Canada lags behind other countries in its response to male violence against women and girls,” added Dawson.

A recurrent theme in the events preceding the murder of a woman or girl are repeated interactions with the criminal justice system or other social services, such as women’s shelters.

“We have to listen to women when they’re expressing fear of their living situation and fear for their children,” Dawson continued. “We have to take them seriously.”

A further tragic statistic in the report is that of the 868 Canadian children left without a mother due to femicide. They are referred to as “living victims,” and many are left without a second parent as well if the case ended in suicide or the incarceration of the perpetrator.

“A woman’s death should be important on its own,” said Dawson, “but understanding femicide is about recognizing the impacts these deaths also have on the people left behind. It reverberates for decades in communities and in the life outcomes of those trying to survive these losses, especially children.”

The Mass Casualty Commission report, investigating the 2020 Nova Scotia mass shooting, recommended that the Canadian government declare “gender-based violence” an epidemic after it was discovered that the gunman had been reportedly abusive and controlling to his spouse and other women in his life.

“Women have been carrying, through community-based organizations, the burden of protecting women almost exclusively for far too long,” MCC commissioner Michael MacDonald told reporters Thursday, while urging men, especially men in positions of power, to call out gender-based violence.

“Men who are leaders in society have to call it out for what it is, it’s an epidemic," he said.

This epidemic is occurring with a backdrop of Canadian women having their sex-based right to the safety and protection of female-only spaces taken away from them by the modern trans rights movement.

All across the country, there are reports of males who identify as women invading women’s safe spaces, while a prominent trans activist calls for aggressive tactics to silence women who disagree with the core beliefs of gender identity ideology.