A/HRC/41/42/Add.1 women. There is, however, a lack of adequate shelters provided to indigenous communities that respect cultural and language diversities and that are led by indigenous women. 2. Legal aid 46. Another concern is the inadequacy of free legal-aid services, including for women survivors of violence, and federal-provincial cost-shared pilot projects providing independent legal advice for survivors are available only in some provinces. Under the Canada Social Transfer, the Government transfers criminal and civil legal aid directly to the provinces and territories. Given that the requirements for provinces and territories to spend Canada Social Transfer money on civil legal aid were removed in 1995, expenditure has fallen drastically. 47. There is a marked gender difference in legal aid use: men are the primary users of criminal legal aid, while women are the primary users of civil legal aid, especially for family law matters. The Canadian Bar Association asserts that the lack of access to civil legal aid disproportionately affects women and indigenous people, as well as other disadvantaged groups. 48. In 2008 and 2016, the Committee recommended that there be standardized minimum criteria for eligibility for legal aid. There continues to be, however, uneven access to legal aid services among provinces and territories and narrow eligibility requirements, which severely curtail women’s access to justice.18 B. Domestic violence 49. Intimate partner violence is one of the most common forms of violence against women in Canada. According to 2017 data, women are victims of intimate partner homicide at a rate five times greater than men. A woman is killed by her partner or former partner every 2.5 days. Of all police-reported violent crime in 2016, more than 26 per cent resulted from family violence. Almost 67 per cent of family violence victims were women and girls. A total of 79 per cent of police-reported intimate partner violence was committed against women during same year.19 C. Sexual assault of women and girls 50. Notwithstanding increased societal awareness about sexual assault, it continues to be a persistent issue. Unlike the rates of other violent crimes, which have been decreasing, the rate of sexual assault has remained unchanged since 2004. According to the 2014 General Social Survey on Canadians’ safety, there were approximately 636,000 self-reported incidents of sexual assault over a 12-month period.20 Because of the pervasiveness of sexual violence in women’s lives, women are now more likely than men to be victims of violent crime. Some groups of women, including indigenous women, young women, those who identify as LGBTQ221 and women with mental health conditions are especially vulnerable to sexual violence. As highlighted in the General Social Survey, more than one in five indigenous women between 15 and 24 years of age reported having been sexually assaulted in 2014, and the sexual assault justice gap, which appears to be rooted in gendered colonization, is glaringly wide between indigenous and non-indigenous women.22 51. A further element of concern is the urgent need for capacity-building to address violence against women and sexual violence by law enforcement officials. The Royal 18 19 20 21 22 See Ab Currie, “The state of civil legal aid in Canada” (2013), and Alison Brewin with Lindsay Stephens, Legal Aid Denied: Women and the Cuts to Legal Services in BC (2004). See Statistics Canada, “Family violence in Canada: a statistical profile, 2016” (2018). See www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2017001/article/54866-eng.htm. LGBTQ2 stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, two-spirit”; where “2” refers to indigenous two-spirit individuals and is inclusive to queer identities. See Government of Alberta, “Independent report on the incarceration of Angela Cardinal” (2018). 9