GBA Plus Supplementary Table

2021 was the first year that the National Victims Services Program was able to report on demographic data related to victims, including ethnicity and gender. The Program generated a number of demographic data reports that were shared with Public Safety Canada for publication in its Corrections and Conditional Release Statistical Overview. The reports were also shared with external stakeholders, including members of the Regional Victims Advisory Committees, Citizen Advisory Committees and Regional Ethnocultural Advisory Committees. This has helped to raise awareness of the demographics of registered victims. While the voluntary, self-reported data remains incomplete, as CSC cannot require victims to provide the information, CSC will continue to encourage victims to provide demographic data through ongoing engagement with them. Knowing that statistically, Indigenous and Black communities suffer victimization of some crimes, such as homicide, at a rate much higher per capita than non-Indigenous or non-visible minority counterparts, CSC believes this means we need to do more outreach in these communities to raise awareness of our services and victims' rights under the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights. CSC has placed a priority on outreach to these communities for the next three years (2020–21 to 2023–24). We will be taking an intersectional approach to our outreach, also working with the LGBTQ2S community and looking at how services may need to be tailored culturally or by gender. The values in the Victims Application Module for gender reporting were updated in March 2021 to include ‘another gender’ in addition to 'female', 'male' and ‘does not want to provide’.

While CSC collects information by gender and diversity for CSC’s volunteers, we do not collect sufficient data to be able to monitor and/or report program impacts. In 2022, we pulled data from the Volunteer Module in HRMS (VHRMS) that included self-reported data for disability, visible monitory and gender for all CSC volunteers, including members of our Citizen Advisory Committees. The report identified that our data is very weak. We do not know if this is attributed to volunteers who have chosen not to self-identify or if they were not given the form to complete when registering as a volunteer. To improve our data for future monitoring and reporting, we are considering an update to our existing self-identification form and a blitz to ask volunteers to submit, if they do not have one on file. However, this would add a burden of data entry on frontline staff and we have to ensure we are managing privacy considerations.