News

Journal Article: How Judges in Canadian Criminal Courts Define Intimate Partner Violence

PATHS’s Director of Research partnered with researchers from Carleton University and the University of Regina to study how judges in the Canadian prairie provinces define IPV in criminal cases. One hundred full-text, written judicial decisions from 2016 to 2022 were analyzed. Findings indicate that judges tend to discuss IPV as it relates to sexual and psychological violence; threats, coercive control, and physical violence; isolation and stalking; economic abuse and threats to take children away. Given that current Canadian law does not recognize psychological abuse as a criminal offence, this may signal a need for the creation of a legal definition of IPV to align with how more directly it is being discussed in courtrooms.

Read the article in the Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being here.