Domestic violence reports rising in Quebec: Can taking care of men save women’s lives?

Police in Quebec have responded to tens of thousands of domestic violence calls in the last decade, with rising reports in several regions.

Over the last decade, tens of thousands of phone calls have been made to police in Quebec to report domestic abuse.

The Sûreté du Québec (SQ), which has jurisdiction across the province, states that since 2015, it has intervened in 82,019 calls for help.

During that same time period, at least 81 women were killed at the hands of their partners, according to police.

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That number, which the SQ admits is most likely underestimated due to the way dossiers are categorized as investigations unfold, doesn’t include cases handled by local police forces, such as Montreal police (SPVM) or Longueuil police (SPAL).

“What we can tell you is that, proportionally...the Sûreté du Québec has slightly more cases than the SPVM, but together, we have about 70 per cent of domestic violence cases in the province,” explains SQ Lieutenant Caroline Girard, provincial coordinator for the fight against intimate partner violence.

The SQ notes that each year, it receives an increasing number of calls from people in distress due to partner violence.

“There could be many reasons why we’re seeing more reports of abuse. It could be victims feeling more confident. It could be the measures that have been put in place, where victims feel less intimidated,” Girard told CTV News. “It could be the justice system. It could be the training of police officers, where they now see the many faces of domestic violence.”

The stats

In 2015, the SQ intervened in 4,257 cases of domestic violence.

In 2024 and 2025, those numbers skyrocketed to 10,035 and 8,937, respectively — the numbers for 2025 do not yet include the month of December.

Most of those calls came in from the Montérégie region, one of the most populated regions in the province, according to the SQ.

In 2015, police responded to 714 cases of domestic disputes in the region.

By 2017, that number had increased to 1,074.

In 2024 and 2025, the numbers stood at 1,688 and 1,589, respectively, with a total of 14,322 calls over the last decade.

The region also has the most persistent yearly femicide rates, with only 2023 holding reprieve.

For its part, Longueuil police (SPAL), which serves the entire urban agglomeration of Longueuil, as well as the cities of Brossard, Boucherville and Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville in the Montérégie, notes that over the last decade, it has intervened in 3,358 cases of domestic violence and recorded four deaths on its territory.

In the Montérégie as a whole, 26 women were killed by a partner in the last 10 years — double the second highest region, the Nord-du-Québec, at 13 murders (970 interventions).

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The only other region with femicide numbers in the double digits is the Laurentians at 11 (7,707 interventions).

The regions with the fewest murders are Bas-Saint-Laurent, with one in 2025 (5,133 interventions); Mauricie, one in 2019 (4,193 interventions); Outaouais, one in 2021 (2,676 interventions); and Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, one in 2017 (3,451 interventions).

Additionally, the years 2021 and 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic, marked the highest number of deaths, at 12 and 10.

“When victims call the police, they usually do so as a last resort. It’s not their first choice,” said Girard. “With the pandemic, women no longer had the opportunity to leave their homes, and so there was an increase in violence.”

She insists that, though there has been an increase in reports over the last decade, “there isn’t more domestic violence.”

“I think there are a multitude of factors that have led to this increase,” said Girard. “When she calls, we’ll be there, no matter how many requests we get. That’s really important to us.”

According to Quebec’s Crown prosecutors, the Directeur des poursuites criminelles et pénales (DPCP), the number of criminal harassment charges related to domestic violence has naturally also increased.

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In 2019, the total number of cases was 2,041; by 2023, it was 3,760.

Girard says that, with the steps taken to increase awareness and educate officers on the ground, she hopes that people will feel less afraid to turn to the justice system for help.

“I would never tell a victim that the legal process is easy. It’s not at all, and it’s not always the right way out either,” said Girard. “A victim who doesn’t want to go through the legal system is perfectly within their rights. But if they do want to, we’ll be there for them.”

‘Stable’ in Montreal

When it comes to the Island of Montreal, police state that the situation is “relatively stable,” adding that domestic violence is a “constant phenomenon, and not a new trend.”

“There is no clear upward or downward trend,” Montreal police (SPVM) tells CTV News. “We are monitoring the situation very closely, in collaboration with our partners, to quickly detect any significant changes and adapt our interventions as needed. Our priority remains to ensure the safety of victims and strengthen the safety net around those most at risk.”

In 2025, the SPVM says it received 15,310 calls to 911 that were coded as domestic violence upon reception.

After police intervention, 3,995 cases of abuse were confirmed.

In the same time period, the SPVM notes that it responded to 3,202 claims of assault, 558 cases of sexual assault and three instances of attempted murder.

“These variations do not reflect a real increase in violence, but rather better training and awareness, and a greater propensity to report,” the force said.

• READ MORE: Montreal police adopt new protocol to strengthen response to domestic violence strangulation

The SPVM notes that there were no domestic violence-related homicides on its territory in 2025.

Similar to the SQ, the highest year for homicides on the Island of Montreal was during the pandemic in 2021 at six, followed by 2024 at four.

The force was not able to differentiate the percentage of 911 calls made by men or women as its operational system “does not differentiate between sexes.”

However, Montreal police confirms that women remain 80 per cent of victims.

Protecting men to save women?

Dr. Cécile Rousseau, Canada research chair in the prevention of violent radicalization and a professor at McGill University’s Division of Social and Cultural Psychiatry, shares her perspective on how to address the ongoing violence against women.

“Protecting women without addressing the distress of men will not work, and very often, there is this idea that when a man is violent, you just use the law, or you just punish them, and things will be OK,” she said. “This is not true. Punishing despair is not effective.”

“Despair” is a word Rousseau repeats often when describing a violent man’s loss of control.

She points out that we, as a society, wait too long to protect women in danger, when really, we should focus on the root problem: what leads these men to be vicious?

“These guys had despair, had nothing to lose, and said they were going to do it [be violent], and finally, they did it,” she said. “Offering help to potential aggressors is not a luxury. It’s not a reward for being bad. It’s addressing the despair, and that, I think, is missed, presently.”

She continues, “Violence is not a sign of strength, it’s a sign of weakness, from an institutional perspective, from a government perspective. When you need to use violence, it means you are in a weak position.”

• READ MORE: Domestic violence groups sound alarm after 4 women killed in Quebec so far in 2026

Rousseau laments that we have entered a “more patriarchal time” in our history, an indicator of the uptick in domestic abuse.

“I would take seriously the fact that reports are going up. People may be reporting more, but some other things are going up, which can indicate that violence toward women is back,” she explains. “Masculinist discourse or misogynistic discourse are on the rise, and that is absolutely unquestionable at the level of the online world, social media, but also in schools.”

Epidemic in our society

Claudine Thibaudeau, a clinical coordinator with SOS violence conjugale, says though she understands Rousseau’s thinking, she largely disagrees.

“The root cause of intimate partner violence is sexism. That’s the root cause. That’s what we need to address,” she argues. “Of course, we need to address it, mostly in men, because that is what gives them a feeling of power and a feeling of entitlement to power in their intimate relationships.”

• READ MORE: Quebec family bill raises concerns for domestic violence groups

She equates addressing men’s issues with allowing them to play the victim — something she says they already do with their victims.

“I don’t agree that we should equate difficult childhood experiences or difficulties in someone’s life or mental health issues to violence,” she said. “If there was a causal effect between suffering and using violence, then most people who would be violent would be women.”

She calls domestic violence an “epidemic in our society.”

“What we need in this society is for more people to be outraged about these situations,” she said. “There are so many of us who are victims of intimate partner violence, and most of us don’t identify it because it’s so subtle.”

In considering the police numbers, Thibaudeau says she believes intimate partner violence has stabilized because of all the measures put in place in recent years.

“I think that, if we hadn’t put in place many different measures, the femicide rate would have gone up,” she tells CTV News. “But this year is quite frightful because we’ve already had five in less than a month.”

What’s next?

The SQ admits that there are still improvements to be made in how the various forces record and share crime stats.

“Sometimes, at the beginning of the investigation, we find links between people that are ‘unknown,’” said Amélie Bois, an SQ expert advisor on police practices and intimate partner violence. “In the long run, the link, for example, is not going to be changed in the file. If the link is not changed, then it remains ‘unknown’... which is problematic.”

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She notes that as information comes to light or as murders are solved — sometimes years later — crime figures can change.

“It’s problematic because we have to highlight these murders of women that occur in very different contexts than murders of men,” she said.

“In Quebec, the police have taken on this responsibility of highlighting these murders of women so that we really have the right figures. We talk a lot more about investigations. We’ve been doing a lot of research since then, and we’re much more involved in cases because we said to ourselves that it doesn’t make sense for murders of women like this to go unnoticed.”