How common is intimate partner violence against women and against men?

There are two very different sources. Police data count incidents that were reported to police and recorded as crimes. Victimization surveys ask a large random sample of people directly about specific behaviours, whether or not they ever told anyone.

In Canada in 2023, women and girls were 78% of victims of intimate partner violence that came to police attention. In Statistics Canada’s 2018 national survey, 12% of women and 11% of men who had ever had a partner said they experienced some form of intimate partner violence in the previous 12 months, a difference Statistics Canada reports as not statistically significant. Over their lifetime since age 15, the figures were 44% of women and 36% of men.

In the United States, the CDC’s national survey found 7.3% of women and 6.8% of men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in the previous 12 months, and 47.3% of women and 44.2% of men over their lifetime.

Police figures are often quoted as if they describe all intimate partner violence, leading to statements that almost all victims are women. Survey figures are sometimes quoted the other way, as if men and women experience the same thing. Both readings drop half of the evidence.

Supported: many men experience intimate partner violence. In both countries, surveys find past-year rates for men close to those for women, and in Canada men reported physical violence in the past year at a similar rate to women (2.8% and 2.4%).

Supported: women experience more of the most severe and harmful violence. In Canada, 37% of women victims had been afraid of a partner, compared with 9% of men, and sexual violence was about three times as common among women in the past year. In the US, 41.0% of women and 26.3% of men reported intimate partner violence with at least one impact such as fear, injury or needing help.

Not established by these figures: why men’s experiences appear so much less often in police data. Possible reasons include men reporting less, the violence men experience being less severe on average, or how incidents are recorded. Statistics Canada found that the vast majority of the intimate partner violence people described in its survey never came to police attention.

The two surveys ask different questions. Canada’s includes psychological abuse such as put-downs, jealousy and monitoring, which accounts for much of its higher overall figures. The US measure covers contact sexual violence, physical violence and stalking, and reports psychological aggression separately. The surveys are also from different years. The pattern is similar in both, but the numbers should not be compared side by side.

A count of people who experienced at least one behaviour does not show how often it happened or how serious it was. Statistics Canada found women more often experienced repeated and frequent abuse.

Surveys rely on what people are willing to report, which may differ between women and men. Police data reflect who comes forward and how incidents are classified.

Statistics Canada ran a second cycle of its survey in 2024 and 2025; this explainer will be updated as those results are published.