Rise in femicide highlights broader systemic problems

Report finds growing number of women, girls killed by violence in Canada

Nearly 200 women and girls were killed by violence in Canada in 2022, the majority by men — the highest number recorded by the national research organization that began tracking femicides five years ago.

The data, released by the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability Thursday, suggests the increase in killings of women and girls documented during the COVID-19 pandemic is “going to continue for some time to come,” said Myrna Dawson, University of Guelph professor and founder of the femicide organization.

“These have been gradual increases over the last three years, and it doesn’t look like they’re diminishing,” Dawson said in an interview.

In the past five years, the Femicide Observatory has documented 850 deaths of women and girls in Canada, or one every 48 hours.

In 2022 there were at least 184 killings, the highest number since the organization began tracking such deaths nationwide in 2018, when it recorded 169. The number has increased each year since 2020, when COVID-19 lockdown measures saw increased rates of intimate partner violence.

In 2020, the Femicide Observatory counted 172 — up from 148 in 2019. In 2021, there were 177.

Among those killed in 2022: 23-year-old Daniella Mallia, whose murder — allegedly by her ex-boyfriend, Dylon Dowman — led to misconduct charges being laid against the Toronto police officer who allegedly failed to investigate her case.

As first reported by the Star, Mallia went to Toronto police three days before her death to report that her ex-boyfriend was harassing and threatening her via text. She repeatedly told police that her ex-boyfriend’s behaviour “caused her to fear for her safety,” according to a police document outlining the Police Service Act misconduct charges laid against Const. Anson Alfonso.

But Alfonso took “no action” to protect Mallia, Toronto police allege, including failing to

charge Dowman despite having reasonable grounds, instead cautioning Mallia despite “ample evidence that (she) was the victim,” the document alleges.

The misconduct charges filed against Alfonso have not been proven at the tribunal. Dowman was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in Mallia’s. His case remains before the courts.

Dawson said Mallia’s “disturbing” case highlights the much broader systemic issues laid bare by the numbers and known all too well by anyone working to stop intimate partner violence. “We don’t listen to women when they say that they feel they’re in danger,” Dawson said.

Responding to Alfonso’s misconduct charge earlier this week, Toronto police chief Myron Demkiw said in a statement he is “concerned about the alleged misconduct in this case.” He added he wanted to reassure

the public that Toronto officers respond to intimate partner violence calls “on a daily basis, and they do so with compassion and professionalism.”

Mallia’s death also underscores how crucial it is to have frank discussions about the role of race and anti-Black racism in gender-based violence, said Nneka MacGregor, a member of the Femicide Observatory and co-founder of the Black Femicide Canada Council.

Hearing how Mallia had called for help from police, MacGregor said her first reaction was “immense sadness at the preventable loss.”

“Then, quickly following the sadness is anger — justifiable anger — at something that we’ve been saying for decades, about how it is not safe” for Black women, Black girls, Black gender-diverse and trans people “to go to the police, expecting that the police will protect us.”

Tope Adefarakan, who cofounded the Black Femicide Canada Council with MacGregor and who has served on Ontario’s Domestic Violence Death Review Committee, said a key piece in combating gender-based violence impacting Black women and girls is collecting race-based data to help understand the full scope of the problem.

“We need to know what the reality is in Canada and we don’t have this data,” said Adefarakan.

Much like the Canadian Femicide Observatory — founded in part to document femicides and produce reports like the one released this week — a central goal of the Black Femicide Canada Council is to track and document instances of Black femicide.

Femicide researchers have for years lamented a dearth of data needed to identify patterns that could help prevent deaths — including accurate information on gender, race and ethnicity. Researchers often have to rely on media reports.

“Every year, we have drawn attention to the data challenges and gaps in documenting the patterns and risks of femicide for Indigenous, Black, and other racialized women and girls,” reads the Femicide Observatory report released this week.

It notes that, during the five years the observatory has collected data, race-based information was available less than half the time. Even so, femicide victims who were Indigenous “continue to be, at minimum, four times higher than their representation in the population,” the report found.

“We also know that other groups of racialized women and girls are at increased risk, but our data quality is even more limited for these women and girls because it is difficult to document their level of risk from public documents,” the report says.

The report notes that Statistics Canada said in 2020 it would begin collecting racebased data with the Canadian Association of the Chiefs of Police. But due to recording biases inherent in police data, the report said questions about this process remain, including how the data will be used and by who.