Final Report of the Independent Systemic Review released

VICTORIA, BC, June 24, 2025 – Dr. Kim Stanton has completed a one-year independent systemic review of the legal system’s treatment of sexual violence and intimate partner violence in British Columbia, and is sharing her Final Report today.

The Final Report contains 21 recommendations for improving the provincial response to sexual violence and intimate partner violence, including:

• The formal declaration that gender-based violence (GBV) is an epidemic in B.C. requiring urgent action.
• The creation of an independent Gender-Based Violence Commissioner for the Province of B.C. to provide overall coordination to a system-wide response to the epidemic.
• Changes to province-wide policy frameworks and legal system rules, policies and procedures to improve the response to sexual violence and intimate partner violence.
• Increased accountability measures for government and legal system actors, including police and Crown counsel, and creation of a standing GBV Death Review Committee.
• Improved cooperation and coordination between system actors.
• A fundamental shift in the value placed upon the expertise and support provided by community-based support workers.
• Significant improvements to the way we implement, track and evaluate programs, policies, and data about sexual violence and intimate partner violence, including a collaborative GBV Data Strategy.
• Investment in prevention of gender-based violence.
• Support for and engagement with Indigenous justice strategies.

Upon release of her Final Report, Dr. Stanton said:

“Gender-based violence is not a private issue; it creates real risks and has immense human and fiscal costs. It must be understood as a matter of pressing public concern. It is pervasive, it is preventable, and it is in all of our interest to act now to address it.

“There have been decades of repeated recommendations to address gender-based violence, but sexual violence and intimate partner violence are still drastically underreported. This Review focused on identifying ways to disrupt that cycle of making recommendations and not achieving urgently needed change.

“The Final Report includes two sets of recommendations:

First, the Final Report identifies systemic barriers that must be removed to achieve meaningful progress in improving how the legal system treats sexual violence and intimate partner violence. Those barriers are: the presence of silos within and between government agencies; a lack of accountability on the part of institutional actors; a failure to appreciate the profound cost to society of inaction to address gender-based violence; and the absence of intersectional analysis in system and program design. Nine recommendations provide a clear path for addressing these system-wide barriers, and the need for both accountability and leadership to make our communities safer. Second, I have proposed a dozen constructive steps to improve the legal system’s treatment of survivors of sexual violence and intimate partner violence. The final recommendation is a call to reimagine what justice can look like by those inside and outside the legal system: small changes are not sufficient to solve complex problems. The preventive and restorative approaches recommended in this Report provide a roadmap to the province on providing meaningful access to justice to survivors of gender-based violence.”

The Final Report, including the Executive Summary, is available on this page of the Independent Systemic Review website.

Quick Facts:

• The Review began on May 30, 2024 with the mandate to conduct an independent, systemic review of the treatment of sexual violence and intimate partner violence in the province’s legal system and to propose recommendations to effectively address this longstanding challenge.
• 94% of sexual assault survivors and 80% of intimate partner violence survivors do not report to police.
• In British Columbia, more than one third (37%) of women over the age of 15 have been sexually assaulted. Nearly half (48%) of women over the age of 15 in British Columbia have experienced intimate partner violence.
• Intimate partner violence is a leading cause of homelessness for women and gender-diverse people in Canada.
• Dr. Stanton is a Canadian lawyer, called to the bar in British Columbia and Ontario. She was a commissioner on the Mass Casualty Commission, the joint federal/provincial public inquiry into the April 2020 Nova Scotia mass casualty.
• The Review included engagement with people across the legal system, policymakers, service providers and survivors.
• The Final Report makes 21 recommendations for change to improve the broader systemic response to sexual violence and intimate partner violence in BC, including specific changes to the legal system.