An Estimation of the Economic Impact of Violent Victimization in Canada, 2009

Notes

Framework

1. Five crime categories are analyzed in this report: assault, criminal harassment, homicide, robbery, and sexual assault and other sexual offences. Each crime category may contain several specific crimes.

2. Only adult victims (18 and up) of incidents involving non-spousal relationships between offender and victim are included.

Data and references

3. All police data that are not cited are from the UCR2, all court and corrections data that are not cited are from the ACCS or the YCS.

4. The UCR2 had national coverage of 99% of the Canadian population in 2009.

5. Following Note 2, all crime incident and court case data presented involves adult victims of non-spousal crime incidents unless explicitly stated otherwise.

6. When referring to sources, the terminology of the source is often used for accuracy. For example, when Dolan et al. (2005) is referenced in the Sexual Assault and Other Sexual Offences section, the terms “rape” and “sexual assault” are used to classify the different sexual offences despite the nature of Canadian law, which classifies sexual assaults based on the level of violence and not necessarily the sexual nature of the crime.

7. Adjustment for exchange rates is done with the Bank of Canada’s annual average exchange rate series Footnote 1. Adjustment for inflation is done with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) data series from Statistics Canada Footnote 2. For inflation, the seventh month is used to adjust periods covering calendar years, while the eleventh month of the earlier year is used to adjust periods covering the fiscal year. If adjustments are required for both exchange rate and inflation, the adjustment for exchange rate is done first.

Presentation

8. Numbers in tables and calculations may not add up to stated totals due to rounding.

9. Detailed calculation tables are available in the companion document to this report: An Estimation of the Economic Impact of Violent Victimization in Canada, 2009: Technical Appendices (Hoddenbagh et al. 2013).

10. Table name conventions: All categories, sub-categories, and cost groups are in bolded font, while cost items are in normal font. For example, the table displaying the estimation of the legal aid cost item for the crime homicide is named Table H.J.1.4. Titles for the appendix tables in An Estimation of the Economic Impact of Violent Victimization in Canada, 2009: Technical Appendices (Hoddenbagh et al. 2013) also include AP in the title, so the appendix table for the legal aid costs of homicide is named Table AP.H.J.1.4. Tables not related to a specific cost item are named for the appropriate section of the report (G. for general, the first letter of the crime for each crime) and for the order they appear in (1, 2, 3, etc.). Appendix tables not related to a specific cost item will indicate that they are expository by E# in the name. Figure names follow the same conventions as table names.

Limitations

11. For data limitations see Limitations.

12. Though the authors have taken all appropriate steps to avoid omitting any reasonable impacts of violent crime, it is possible that there have been inadvertent omissions. For this reason and the approaches taken due to the data limitations, the costs contained in this report are an underestimate of the true economic impacts.

13. The authors acknowledge that the responses about physical and mental impacts to the different crime types may be fundamentally different. Treating mental health issues (in the form of depression or anxiety, for example) caused by assault or robbery the same as those caused by sexual assault may understate (under certain circumstances) the true impact on a sexual assault victim’s mental health.

14. Note that comparing the costs of the different crimes can be misleading, as the information and data used in the calculations are not comparable across crimes. The data limitations for each crime are unique to that crime. The range of costs included for one crime may be more comprehensive than the range of costs included for another crime, or the data for one crime may be more complete than the data for another crime even if the data source is the same for both crimes. For example, in the case of a homicide where the victim was employed, there will be costs to the employer (e.g., administrative, re-hiring, retraining, insurance, lost short-term productivity, etc.), but little information is available on the amount of these costs or on the employment status of homicide victims, so these costs cannot be estimated. Assault, robbery, and sexual assault, meanwhile, present their own limitations, as in the operating cost of support centres; since data are available on the number of victims using these services, there are reasonable grounds to make an estimate, but since there are no data on the cost of these services, a conservative assumption must be made. Though the nature of the problem is different in both cases, the result is an underestimation of the true costs of crime. Which specific crime has bigger limitations is impossible to know, as the true extent of the impacts of each crime is both difficult to ascertain and contentious. It is still useful and of interest to calculate these costs and to compare, but comparison must be done with this caveat in mind. For example, this report does not state categorically that one crime results in more costs to Canadians than another crime, it only gives an indication of the costliness of each crime based on the available data.

15. Note that comparison of the same cost items across different crime categories can be misleading. For the most part, the methods used for cost items are the same across crime categories, but in some cases a different method, or different sources or base numbers, are used. For example, A.V.1.2.2 Medication costs (medication costs for assault victims) has a different methodology than S.V.1.2.2 Medication costs (medication costs for sexual assault and other sexual offences victims). The report attempts to provide the best estimate of each cost item possible, so if a source or some data are available for a cost item in one crime category but not another crime category it will be used for the sake of accuracy.