Two days before the IJB’s femicide story published, I felt the emotional heaviness begin to set in.
The federal government had just proposed sweeping changes to the Criminal Code that would, for the first time, add the term femicide to the list of offences a person can commit. On paper — and certainly in the moment of the announcement — it felt like a victory, the promise of a new, safer era for women.
But once the speeches ended and the applause faded, the feeling shifted. It was hard to celebrate a milestone that arrived so late. It felt like a hollow victory in a long, ongoing tragedy. Each of the 1,329 women and girls tabulated in the IJB’s national database who have died in criminal or suspicious circumstances represent a dot on the map.
Together, they form a haunting tattoo that spans the country.
Violence against women is one of the few experiences that unites Canadians, regardless of geography or background. Statistically, it’s almost impossible to live in this country and not know a woman or girl who has been abused — most often by a man — at some point in her life.
Experts say nearly 50 per cent of women in Canada have reported experiencing intimate partner violence.
Some escape. Too many, as our team discovered over a year of reporting, do not.
Why did it take 1,329 women and girls — 341 of them Indigenous, 122 of them children — being killed in just six years before decision-makers acted?
Behind every name in this database is a constellation of devastation: children who will grow up without their mothers, families torn apart by grief, communities struggling to make sense of senseless loss. Why did it take the anguished screams of hundreds of loved ones — people whose mothers, daughters and sisters were ripped away — to finally command national attention?
Why did academics have to publish paper after paper, year after year, over entire careers spent studying the same crisis, before their research was taken seriously?
It is a cruel calculus: the amount of human suffering required before action is considered.
Women and girls have been killed at alarming rates in Canada for years. The data that justified this proposed legislation was available a decade ago.
Think of the lives that might have been saved.
There is no pleasure in building this database — a digital graveyard where columns, rows and drop-down menus stand in for tombstones and memorial plaques.
But it is necessary.
It is a tool meant to confront Canadians with a truth that is uncomfortable, undeniable and long overdue for reckoning.
Our reporting continues.
