Annual Cost of Violence $6.9B After Women Leave Abusive Partners: UBC Research

The University of British Colombia has released research that suggests that the violence still costs Canadians an estimated $6.9 billion a year, even after women have separated from an abusive partner.

Led by UBC Nursing Prof. Colleen Varcoe, the study – published in a recent issue of Canadian Public Policy – is the first in Canada to comprehensively identify the spectrum of economic costs for services used by women who leave a violent partner.

Overall, the annual bill for violence rings in at a total of $13,162 per woman across health and non-health sectors, and within public and private domains. This estimate represents the use of health, legal and social services.

The study analyzed categories of cost to publicly funded programs and services that include hospitalization, X-rays, visits to the doctor, legal aid, children protection worker, unemployment insurance and social assistance. The study also calculated private, third-party costs such as psychologist, dentist, counselling and food bank use.

The costs were identified by collecting service use and other data from 309 women who had left an abusive male partner within the previous three years. From B.C., Ontario and New Brunswick, the women were interviewed every year for five years.

To determine how much of the costs were due to violence, the researchers compared the women’s use of services to that by women of a similar age in the general population. To arrive at the number of women in Canada impacted by intimate partner violence, the study used raw Statistics Canada data. The 2006 Census confirmed there were 10.3 million women in Canada aged 19-65. About one in ten – 1.3 million women – were legally separated or divorced, and not living with a partner.

The researchers then cross-referenced these statistics against findings from the 1993 “Violence Against Women Survey” (VAWS), the largest population-based survey focused on violence in Canada. The VAWS data show that 50.7 per cent of women reported physical assault from a former partner, 22.8 per cent in the three years preceding interview. The team then applied these percentages to 1.3 million women.

This allowed the investigators to make conservative estimates of $6.9 billion if including women have left abusive partners in Canada, and $3.1 billion if only including women who experienced violence in the past three years.

You can access the media release from the University of British Colombia concerning the research here.

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