Worldwide, intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) is recognized as the most pervasive and prevalent human rights violation. Despite being ranked among the highest-achieving countries in gender equality, Canada faces an epidemic of IPVAW.
Canada’s approach to ending IPVAW is falling short. For decades, policies have focused heavily on the criminalization of perpetrators of abuse, including expanded policing and charging policies, justice-sector reforms, and constitutional guarantees such as equal rights for women and girls, and security of the person. These tools remain essential for immediate safety and accountability, and for creating the enabling environment necessary for realizing gender justice, they act after harm or imminent risk; they cannot, on their own, however, transform the conditions that allow violence to persist.
To achieve prevention, we need to adopt a new policy lens that refigures gender norms, time use, and reproductive labour inside households. Political philosopher Nancy Fraser refers to this model as the “Universal Caregiver:” a framework that treats caregiving as a shared social responsibility for all genders, rather than a tasked primarily assigned to women. While not a magic bullet, the Universal Caregiver (UC) approach plausibly reduces IPVAW by targeting drivers of violence – gender norms, household power imbalances, economic dependence, stress, poverty, and isolation – where criminal justice tools cannot reach.
Currently, gender policy in Canada often prioritizes assimilating women into male-dominated job markets through childcare, pay equity, and anti-harassment measures. Canada’s recent expansion of affordable childcare, the federal move towards $10-a-day care, is a major and hard-fought achievement by the feminist and labour movements that meaningfully supports families and increases women’s economic opportunities. It should be celebrated and built upon.
Even so, many of our gender-equality tools, including parental leave as a function of Employment Insurance, remains tied to labour-market engagement in ways that reinforce women’s primary responsibility for care. Fraser describes this approach as a version of the “Universal Breadwinner” model: one that expands women’s participation in paid work but still leaves patriarchal caregiving intact. While this approach has clear benefits, it does not sufficiently disrupt the cultural scripts that enable IPVAW.
Under a UC lens, policy design aims explicitly to equalize caregiving and economic security for caregivers, thereby eroding patriarchal norms and the intersectional vulnerabilities that heighten risk. When care is configured as women’s work, masculinity is defined in binary opposition to care – through dominance, control, and violence. When care is expected of everyone, this script weakens. Research by Equimondo highlights that the routine involvement of men in childcare and eldercare normalizes non-violence conflict resolution and empathy. Quebec’s paternity-leave design is a clear Canadian template for the operationalization of UC policy: a substantial, non-transferable, “use-it-or-lose-it” paid leave for the second parent.
In practice, the government of Canada can operationalize UC policy through:
- Introducing paid, job-protected caregiver leave across the life course, recognizing that care needs extend beyond infancy
- Reforming Employment Insurance so parental and caregiver benefits are individual entitlements with lower eligibility thresholds to include precarious workers
- Expanding affordable, high-quality childcare and eldercare, especially in underserved communities
- Pairing structural measures with behaviour-change programming that engages boys and men in healthy relationship skills and non-violence
In an era some call “post-feminist,” women in Canada and around the world are still being beaten and murdered by their partners. IPVAW is not just a private family problem– it is a public health crisis, a human rights issue, and a drain on the economy. We should therefore pursue both tracks: maintain robust criminal-justice responses for immediate safety and accountability and adopt a UC policy agenda to dismantle the conditions that breed violence.
If our political leaders are serious about protecting Canadian interests during this time of global instability, Canada must adopt a holistic, evidence-based approach to IPVAW – and gender equity more broadly — that integrates care, challenges patriarchal norms, and addresses intersectional vulnerabilities.
