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By LegalMatters Staff • Violent crime has reached its highest point since 2007 according to media reports, but do the numbers tell the full story?
Ottawa criminal lawyer Celine Dostaler urges caution, noting there are multiple factors that must be considered.
“One of the prime reasons for a surge in crime is the end of the pandemic,” she says. “Those of us who work in the criminal justice system fully expected that there would be a rise in charges after COVID-19 when people were forced to stay in the safety of their own homes.”
Dostaler says she is also wary about another media report that states that the “rate of police-reported sexual assault in Canada has reached its highest level since 1996.”
“What this article does not explain is that the term ‘sexual assault’ covers a wide range of activities,” she says. “At the low end, it includes the touching of intimate body parts. The term also includes rape. We must be careful when we read that sexual assaults are increasing.”
Also, since there is no statute of limitations for filing a report about sexual assault, it is unclear how many people are now coming forward with accounts of sexual assault that happened years or decades ago, Dostaler explains.
“Are those reports being included in the current statistics about sexual assaults?” she asks. “If so, that skews the current data and the conclusions that can be drawn from it.”
