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2020 #CallItFemicide Report

The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability was established on December 6, 2017 in response to a call for action from the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences for countries to document gender-related killings of women by collecting, analyzing and reviewing data on femicides with the aim of prevention.

The CFOJA is a partnership of advocates and researchers from across Canada, who bring expertise from different communities and areas of work related to the prevention of gender-based violence. PATHS’ Executive Director Jo-Anne Dusel and Director of Research and Communications Crystal Giesbrecht are members of the CFOJA’s Expert Advisory Panel.

For the past three years, the CFOJA has released reports documenting the killings of women and girls in Canada. The most recent report, #CallItFemicide: Understanding Sex/Gender-Related Killings of Women and Girls in Canada, 2020, was released in March 2021.

The report documents that 160 women and girls were murdered in Canada in 2020. Over the past five years, 761 women and girls have been killed by violence in Canada—most by men who were close to them. This means that, on average, a woman or girl is killed every 2.5 days. Data collected by the CFOJA illustrates that females are most often killed by a male intimate partner or family member, while males were more likely to be killed by male friends or acquaintances.