2024–2025 GBA Plus supplementary information 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 certain types of crime, 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, including working with the 2SLGBTQI+ 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’. Given this new data available to the program, CSC will be reviewing its GBA Plus in 2024-25 and updating it as needed.

With respect to CSC’s volunteers, while CSC collects information by gender and diversity, it does not collect sufficient data to be able to monitor or report on program impacts. Data can be extracted from the Volunteer Module in HRMS (VHRMS), which includes self-reported data for (dis)ability, visible minority and gender for all CSC volunteers, including members of the Citizen Advisory Committees. In 2022, a report with the information from VHRMS identified that our data is limited. This can be attributed to lack of requesting the information from volunteers and/or volunteers having chosen not to self-identify. To improve our data for future monitoring and reporting, we are working on transitioning from the existing self-identification form to a voluntary (digital and anonymous) self-identification survey. The survey is expected to be issued every two years starting in FY 2024-25, with questions relating to gender, race and disability. Results will assist in identifying potential gaps and opportunities with respect to demographics; more specifically, to ensure that volunteers reflect diversity in geographical area and offender population profiles and needs. Given the anonymity of the survey, we are hoping for increased participation and information.