Changing Help-Seeking Rates for Intimate Partner Violence in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The adverse physical and psychological sequelae of intimate partner violence (IPV) are well documented, as are government initiatives in Canada since the early 1990s to address the problem through public awareness campaigns and service enhancement programs. While these initiatives have been designed to encourage abused women to come forward, there has been little research examining changes over time in help-seeking rates among this group. To fill this void, we compared data from two large Canadian population-based, cross-sectional telephone surveys: the 1993 Violence Against Women Survey (1993-VAWS) and the 1999 General Social Survey (1999-GSS). Among women who reported physical and/or sexual violence by a current or previous partner, we examined differences in rates of disclosure of abuse, help-seeking by type of service, and barriers to service use. Abused women in the 1999-GSS were significantly more likely than those in the 1993-VAWS to have reported disclosing a violent incident(s) to a family member (66.4% v. 43.9%), friend or neighbor (67.4% v. 45.4%), doctor or nurse (31.9% v. 23.0%), and/or minister, priest, or cleric (11.5% v. 7.3%). The 1999-GSS cohort was also more likely to have presented to a shelter or transition house (11.0% v. 7.8%), a crisis center (17.3% v. 4.2%), a counselor or psychologist (39.1% v. 14.7%), a women's center (11.2% v. 3.4%), and/or a community or family center (15.4% v. 4.7%). Among those women who did not seek help, fewer in the 1999-GSS reported that they did not know of any services (6.4% v. 17.0%), or that services were not available (0.8% v. 14.5%). Although we found a demonstrable increase in the numbers of abused women seeking help, overall, rates of service utilization were still low as late as 1999, highlighting the importance of continued government commitment to funding IPV initiatives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".