YWCA Toronto – Written Deputation Submission to Toronto Police Service Board regarding Intimate Partner Violence
YWCA Toronto
Written Deputation Submission to Toronto Police Service Board regarding Intimate Partner Violence
November 2025
My name is Sami Pritchard and I am the Director of Advocacy and Communications for YWCA Toronto, which is the city’s largest multi-service nonprofit organization serving nearly 13,000 women, gender diverse individuals and their families annually from Etobicoke to Scarborough. Our services include a range of services to support survivors and their families – including two emergency shelters and mental health and wellness supports.
In order to address any crisis, we must begin by recognizing it, so with that, I want to extend our gratitude for including this item on your agenda again this year and for the efforts that have been made to engage community organizations such as ours in addressing the epidemic of intimate partner violence facing our city.
We know that IPV is a profound threat to the safety, dignity and well-being of individuals and the broader community. And, that it intersects with mental health challenges, housing precarity and many other systemic barriers. The root causes of IPV are deeply entrenched in societal issues such as gender inequality, systemic violence, and economic oppression, and these require a broader societal response that goes beyond the traditional role of policing.
Systems of power and control often perpetuate intimate partner violence, and these systems are not external to institutions like the police service; in fact, they are embedded within them. To achieve real transformation, the police service must actively confront these dynamics within its own structures and leadership.
Community organizations such as those deputing here today have made a number of recommendations through various forums, including ensuring trauma-informed training for officers, a multi-sector coordinated response, and more disaggregated data collection to surface barriers faced by survivors from historically oppressed communities. And we want to acknowledge the steps TPS has taken to begin to implement these recommendations, while recognizing the need for greater action.
Key Concerns:
- Data transparency and disaggregation: while data has become more publicly-available then it once was, and we appreciate the work done to document cases by division – what remains missing is how many of these cases were followed with investigation, how many resulted in charges or support referrals, and how outcomes vary for Indigenous, Black, racialized and newcomer women, non-binary or Two-Spirit survivors. This is key information to truly understand and assess how this crisis is being responded to.
- Trauma-informed, culturally-responsive policing: efforts made to train more officers is welcomed; however, survivors continue to share with us that they are misunderstood by officers who do not recognize power dynamics, coercive control and intersectional trauma. A lack of trauma-informed approaches leads to less reporting. An intersectional, trauma-informed lens must center on those most at risk.
- Members of our city-funded IPV/GBV Working Group met with members of TPS over the summer to learn about the I.P.V.I Course. In that discussion, a few key concerns were raised about the training that are not reflected in this report that I want to ensure are named, including:
- the training not being all encompassing of the intersection of identity and experiences of IPV – ex. specified training regarding experiences for seniors and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, but not Black or newcomer communities.
- Which officers were receiving the newer, more robust training, and the sheer fact that it is not all officers. Recognizing that most are only base-level training unless they are entering a new role specific to IPV investigation or returning from leave.
- We know that to move the dial, mandatory and regular trauma‐informed, culturally‐responsive IPV training for all frontline officers and first-responders, co-designed with community agencies and survivors’ voices, is critical.
Community partnerships:
- We would encourage you to continue connecting with organizations serving survivors to develop a comprehensive, tailored plan that addresses the unique challenges and opportunities specific to law enforcement’s role in IPV prevention, which includes an extensive evaluation of existing responses, analyzing effectiveness and identifying gaps.
- We need to ensure multi-agency coordination. Addressing IPV is not something that can be solely addressed by policing. It requires a coordinated response across social services, housing, mental health, and community agencies.
Additional recommendations:
- Commissioning a dedicated annual IPV-response report within the TPS annual report framework: continue to include the number of calls flagged as IPV, arrest/charge rates, outcome timelines and survivors’ satisfaction, by disaggregated demographics (race, gender identity, newcomer status, disability, etc).
- Ensure that dispatch, neighbourhood policing, outreach units and patrols allocate sufficient resources to high-risk IPV zones and that risk-assessment tools that have been supported by community organizations specialized in preventing and addressing GBV, are used consistently and with community oversight.
Conclusion:
When survivors of intimate partner violence know that calling for help will reliably lead to protection, respect and follow-up, we strengthen the fabric of community safety. When they do not, we all pay the cost – in trauma, lost lives, and deepening mistrust.
As we have stated before, while we do not believe that the police should be the primary responders to intimate partner violence, we must ensure that when women, girls and gender diverse people do seek police response, it is as supportive and effective as possible.
We ask the Board to use its mandate to direct a clear pathway for TPS to improve its IPV-response and prevention performance, to publish more and intersectional data, continue to seek opportunities to engage survivors and community partners, and build a system where police are one piece of a larger safety ecosystem.
Thank you for your time.
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Sami Pritchard is the Director of Advocacy and Communications at YWCA Toronto