Family members convicted of violent crimes against spouses, children and seniors are less likely than other violent offenders to get a prison term, a new Statistics Canada report says.
The study, which focused on court records from 1997 to 2002 in 18 urban areas in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta, found that judges handed down prison terms in 19 per cent of convicted cases of spousal violence.
In contrast, they incarcerated about 29 per cent of offenders who were convicted of other violent offences.
Criminal harassment – stalking – was the only violent offence that did not follow the trend.
"Of those convicted of criminal harassment, one-third of spouses received a prison term, compared with one-quarter of offenders who were not convicted of spousal violence," the report says.
Family members convicted of physical violence against children received less-harsh sentences, compared with cases that did not involve family members.
The opposite was true in convicted cases of sexual assault. Family members convicted of sexually assaulting children received harsher sentences than others convicted of sexually assaulting a child to whom they were unrelated.
Parents convicted of sexually assaulting their children were more likely than other family members to receive a prison sentence.
In the 18 urban centres for which data were available, adult criminal courts processed nearly 47,000 cases of violent crime between 1997 and 2002 in which convictions were recorded.
Of these, 35 per cent involved spouses. The next most-common convictions were those involving friends or acquaintances (32 per cent), followed by strangers (21 per cent) and other family members (8 per cent). The relationship of the victim to the offender was unknown in 4 per cent of convicted cases.
Among the cases of spousal violence involving a single conviction, 92 per cent involved male spousal offenders.
