Domestic Violence in Canada: How the System Works and Who Decides What

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There is no offence in the Criminal Code called domestic violence. What exists is an ordinary criminal charge, assault, uttering threats, mischief, criminal harassment, forcible confinement, laid in a particular relationship, plus a layer of policy that attaches to that relationship and changes how the whole file is handled. Ontario's Crown Prosecution Manual calls it intimate partner violence and states plainly that it is not a private matter but is a serious criminal act. This page is a map of the system that follows. It is not a walkthrough of what happens next. It sets out who holds each decision, what each institution can do, and what it has no power to do at all.

By Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner, Kazandji Law. Updated July 2026.

Five institutions now hold a piece of this case, and your partner is not one of them

Ontario's Crown Prosecution Manual, in the directive on intimate partner violence, defines the field this way. Intimate partner violence involves the use of physical, psychological or sexual force, actual or threatened, as well as criminal harassment, in an intimate relationship. It adds that intimate relationships vary in duration and legal formality, and include dating, living common law or married, whether current or former.

Two things follow from that definition and both surprise people. Dating counts. Former counts. A six-week relationship that ended two years ago produces the same treatment as a twenty-year marriage.

The directive then states the proposition the entire structure rests on: intimate partner violence is not a private matter but is a serious criminal act. Once you have absorbed that sentence, very little of what follows should surprise you, because every rule underneath it is designed on the assumption that the two people involved should not be the ones deciding what happens.

From the moment police attend, decisions about where you sleep, who you may speak to, whether you see your children and what happens to your status in this country get distributed across institutions. The two people who were actually in the room hold almost none of them.

The decision	Who actually makes it	Who does not
Whether a charge is laid	The investigating officer, on reasonable grounds	The complainant, no matter what they want
Whether you are released from the station	The officer in charge, or a justice at a bail hearing	Either of the two people involved
What conditions attach to your release	The justice, on the Crown position and the Criminal Code factors	The two of you by agreement
Whether the charge is withdrawn	The Crown, and not on a request from the complainant alone	The police, who have already done their part
Whether an early intervention resolution is available	The prosecutor, measured against five criteria in the directive	You, however sincere the offer
Whether a peace bond resolution is accepted	The prosecutor, with approval from the Crown Attorney or a designate	The complainant
Whether a child protection file is opened	The agency, acting on a report it receives	The Crown and police, who report but do not decide
Whether a conviction costs you your status	Federal decision makers under the immigration legislation	The criminal court that sentenced you

The rest of this page takes those institutions one at a time. If your question is about the charge itself, its elements, the defences and the court steps, that ground is covered on our pages about domestic assault charges in Ontario and our domestic assault lawyer page. Where the allegation is one of following, messaging or repeated unwanted contact rather than force, see criminal harassment defence. This page is about the machinery around the charge rather than the charge itself.

What the officer at the door decides, and what the officer has no power to decide

Ontario police operate under a mandatory charging policy for domestic occurrences. Where an officer has reasonable grounds to believe an offence has been committed, the officer lays the charge. The complainant's wishes do not govern that decision, and officers are expected to explain to both people that laying the charge is the officer's duty and that only a Crown can withdraw it.

So the officer at your door holds a short list of real decisions:

• Whether reasonable grounds exist at all, which is a genuine judgment call on incomplete information.
• Which offence best fits what they believe happened, and that choice follows the file for months.
• Whether to release you from the station or hold you for a bail hearing.
• What goes into the notes and the synopsis, which is the first document a prosecutor reads and, in practice, the one that frames everything after it.

And a list of things the officer cannot do, whatever anyone says at the scene:

• Defer to the complainant who says they do not want a charge.
• Withdraw the charge the next morning once everyone has calmed down.
• Undo the charge because both people now describe the evening differently.

That gap explains the reaction we hear more than any other, which is flat disbelief that police laid a charge nobody asked for. The policy exists precisely because that request is so common and, historically, was so often made under pressure from the person standing in the same room.

The one thing you actually control

Silence. Not rudeness, not a story, not a helpful explanation. You are not required to give a statement, and nothing you say at the door in the first twenty minutes will persuade an officer to unmake a decision the policy has already made for them. What it will do is appear in the synopsis, summarised in the officer's words rather than yours, and get read by every person who touches the file afterwards. Say that you will not be answering questions and that you want to speak to a lawyer. Then stop talking.

Who decides whether you go home tonight, and what the Criminal Code makes them weigh

Release is decided either by the officer in charge at the station or by a justice at a bail hearing. In domestic files a hold for a bail hearing is common, and it is common because the Criminal Code tells the decision maker to look directly at the relationship.

Section 515(3) requires the justice to consider any relevant factors, including whether the accused is charged with an offence in the commission of which violence was used, threatened or attempted against their intimate partner, and whether the accused has previously been convicted of a criminal offence, including any offence involving violence against any person.

Sections 515(4.2) and (4.3) go further. Before making a release order for an offence in the commission of which violence against a person was used, threatened or attempted, including against the accused's intimate partner, the justice shall consider whether to include a condition prohibiting communication with a named person, and a condition prohibiting the accused from going to a specified place or geographic area.

When the onus flips

Section 515(6)(b.1) creates a reverse onus, meaning you have to show cause why your detention is not justified, where the offence allegedly involved violence used, threatened or attempted against your intimate partner, and you were previously convicted or discharged under section 730 of an offence involving violence against any intimate partner of yours.

Two precise points that a surprising number of legal websites get wrong.

A discharge counts. Someone who received a conditional or absolute discharge years ago, and who has been told ever since that they do not have a record, is caught by this provision. The section says convicted or discharged under section 730, and it means it.

The earlier partner does not have to be the same person. The words are any intimate partner of theirs. A prior involving a previous relationship engages the reverse onus in the current one.

What the Crown is instructed to do

The directive tells prosecutors that at all stages of the prosecution, including bail hearings, the safety of victims and their families is a paramount factor in the exercise of discretion. It tells the prosecutor to seek a detention order where she considers it necessary for the safety and security of the victim or the public. It requires that risk assessment information be considered, and it identifies risk factors including a history of violence, a pending or actual separation, and substance abuse issues.

Read that middle risk factor twice. A pending or actual separation is a listed consideration weighing against release. The very fact that the relationship is ending, which most people assume reduces the risk, is treated as a factor that raises it. That single line explains a great many bail outcomes that otherwise look inexplicable to the family sitting in the back of the courtroom. If a bail hearing is coming, our page for Ontario bail lawyers sets out how these hearings get prepared.

One more provision worth knowing. Section 515(12) allows a justice, even where the accused is detained, to direct that the accused abstain from communicating with any victim, witness or other person identified in the order. Detention does not remove the no-contact problem. It relocates it.

What is already in the Crown's file before a prosecutor has spoken to you

By the time a prosecutor first opens your file, a picture of you has been assembled and you took no part in assembling it. Typically it contains the synopsis written by the attending officer, the complainant's statement and often a video recording of it, any 911 recording with the tone of voice preserved, photographs of injuries or of the room or of a damaged door, officer observations of how both people presented on arrival, medical records where an ambulance attended, any record of prior police attendance at that address whether or not it produced a charge, any messages either person handed over, and risk assessment material.

Two consequences follow, and they matter more than any argument about who started it.

The first is that the case does not depend on the complainant in the way people assume it must. Recordings, photographs, records and officer evidence are all capable of carrying a prosecution on their own.

The second is that the file is a snapshot of one evening, taken by people who arrived after the worst of it, and it contains no context at all. Context arrives later. It arrives through disclosure requests, through cross-examination, and through written submissions made by counsel. It does not arrive through a phone call to the investigating officer explaining that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and every such call becomes part of the file.

Who is holding it

Each Crown Attorney's office in Ontario has a designated Intimate Partner Violence Prosecutor, who is also a member of the local Domestic Violence High-Risk Committee and of any Domestic Violence Court Advisory Committee. These files are not handed to whoever happens to be free that morning. They sit inside a structure built specifically for them, staffed by people who do this work constantly.

On the screening decision, the directive states that given the prevalence and danger of intimate partner violence it will usually be in the public interest to proceed with these prosecutions, and that ultimately the decision to prosecute must be based on factors specific to each case. The second half of that sentence is the opening. It is narrow, it is real, and it is where careful defence work gets done.

Why your partner cannot drop the charges, in the Crown's own words

We are asked this more than any other question in this area, and more often by the complainant than by the accused. The answer is published, it is in writing, and it is not ambiguous.

That last sentence is the reason for the rule. If a complainant's request were decisive, then the person best placed to pressure the complainant would effectively control the prosecution. The policy takes the lever away by taking the decision away.

What a complainant's position does do is form part of the circumstances the prosecutor must consider. It is input. It is not instruction. A complainant who wants the matter to end can say so clearly, can decline to provide further statements, and can get independent legal advice about their own position. What they cannot do is withdraw the charge, because the charge was never theirs to begin with.

Who can actually end a prosecution

Only two answers exist. The Crown, by withdrawing or staying the charge. Or a court, by dismissing it or acquitting. That is the entire list. Not the police, who discharged their function when they laid it. Not the complainant. Not the two of you together, however genuine the reconciliation.

What actually moves a Crown

Evidence, and the directive's own criteria. A demonstrable problem with the case as a matter of proof. A resolution that serves the public interest, such as the early intervention route or a peace bond in a suitable case, each of which has its own gates and is dealt with further down this page. Those conversations happen between counsel, with materials, on the record. They do not happen between an accused person and a prosecutor, and an accused person who tries to have one directly does themselves considerable harm.

What happens when the complainant recants or refuses to testify

A recantation is not a withdrawal, and it does not end a prosecution.

The directive requires the prosecutor to consider the reasons for the recantation or the refusal, to consider whether the case can be proven using other evidence, and to consider the appropriateness of an adjournment. Three obligations, and not one of them is to discontinue.

Where a case can be proven without the complainant, it can proceed without them. A 911 recording captures a moment nobody can later soften. Photographs do not change their account. Officer observations of two people ten minutes after the fact are evidence in their own right. Medical records are records. A prosecution built on those things is harder than one with a co-operative witness, and it is not impossible, and prosecutors run them.

A risk complainants are rarely warned about

A person who gave a detailed statement to police and then says something materially different on the stand can find their own credibility in issue, and in some circumstances their own position becomes precarious. Anyone considering that step needs independent legal advice from a lawyer who is not acting for the accused. Our office cannot advise both people in the same matter, and neither can any other office. That is not a formality. It is the reason both people need somebody in their corner who is only in their corner.

What this means in practice

Two people who have reconciled, who both want the case gone, and who are entirely consistent about wanting it gone, still cannot end it between them. What they can do is make sure each has independent advice, that neither of them breaches a live condition in the meantime, and that anything genuinely bearing on the strength of the case reaches defence counsel properly rather than through a conversation that nobody can later prove happened.

Who can change a bail condition, and why an agreement between the two of you does not count

Bail conditions are imposed by a justice, on the Crown's position, under the Criminal Code. They are not a private arrangement between two people, and the two people bound up in them cannot alter them by agreeing with each other.

Varying a condition takes one of two things: the Crown's consent, put properly before the court, or an order of the court. Until one of those happens, the condition stands exactly as written. And the Crown's position on a variation is shaped by the same safety considerations the directive applies to the original bail decision, which is why a variation request supported by a plan does better than one supported by a wish.

Contact before a variation is granted is a breach. It is a breach if the complainant initiated it. It is a breach if the complainant invited you back to the house and cooked dinner. It is a breach if you were only collecting your own clothes. The order binds you, not them. And the reason people breach is almost never defiance. It is a reconciliation that nobody told the court about.

What directly or indirectly actually means

Section 515(4)(d) allows a condition that the accused abstain from communicating, directly or indirectly, with any victim, witness or other person identified in the order. The word that catches people is indirectly.

Section 515(4)(e) allows a geographic condition prohibiting you from attending a specified place or area. In practice that is the family home, and frequently a workplace and a school as well.

If a variation is what you need, it gets done properly and through counsel. Our pages on changing bail and release conditions and on what happens if you breach bail in Ontario set out how each of those runs.

The early intervention route: the five things a prosecutor is directed to check first

The directive contains a route most people have never heard of, and it states precisely when a prosecutor may consider it. Counselling provided by an early intervention program may be recommended only where all of the following are true:

1. The accused pleads guilty, or agrees to enter into a section 810 recognizance.
2. The accused has no convictions for violence-related offences.
3. The accused did not cause serious injuries or harm.
4. No weapon was used in the offence.
5. The victim is consulted.

All five. Not most of them, and not four out of five with a good explanation for the fifth. This is a checklist anybody can measure their own situation against before somebody gives them false hope, and it is the reason a defence lawyer's first questions are about your record and about injuries rather than about how you were feeling that night.

Two things about the list are worth sitting with. The first gate requires something real from you, either a guilty plea or a recognizance, so early intervention is not a route to the case quietly evaporating. And the fifth gate says the victim is consulted, which is a different thing from the victim deciding. Consultation is an input to a decision somebody else makes.

Where probation forms part of a sentence, the directive says the prosecutor should consider whether the Partner Assault Program or another relevant counselling program is appropriate. Counselling therefore appears at both ends of the process. Starting a suitable program voluntarily and early, before anybody asks you to, is one of the very few things an accused person can do on their own initiative that genuinely helps.

We do not publish session counts, durations, fees or eligibility rules for those programs on this page, because they vary and nobody should be planning around a number they read on a website. Ask about your own circumstances and get a real answer.

Section 810 peace bonds: who inside the Crown's office has to sign off

A peace bond under section 810 of the Criminal Code is not a conviction and not a finding of guilt. It is an order that a person keep the peace and be of good behaviour, on conditions, for a defined period. In the right case it can be how the matter ends.

The institutional point, and this page is about institutional points, is that the prosecutor standing in front of you cannot simply agree to one. The directive requires that a decision to agree to a section 810 recognizance be approved by the Crown Attorney or a designate. That is why an answer sometimes takes a week, why a proposal made properly and in writing does considerably better than one floated in a hallway, and why pressing for a decision on a busy remand date rarely produces one.

Two requirements come attached. In all cases where a prosecutor decides that a section 810 recognizance is appropriate, firearms and weapons prohibitions must be considered as conditions of the peace bond. And a prosecutor must not use a common law peace bond in intimate partner violence cases unless a section 810 recognizance is not available, and even then only with the prior approval of the Crown Attorney or a designate.

So the common law peace bond, which appears on a fair number of legal websites as the soft landing everybody hopes for, is effectively off the table in this area as a matter of published policy.

Why avoiding a conviction matters so much here

Section 718.2(a)(ii) of the Criminal Code makes it an aggravating circumstance on sentence that the offender, in committing the offence, abused the offender's intimate partner or a member of the victim's or the offender's family. Deemed aggravating, not discretionary. The sentencing judge does not weigh whether the relationship makes it worse. Parliament has already decided that it does.

A peace bond is not nothing. It carries conditions, breaching it is an offence in itself, and it can surface on some records checks. But it ends the prosecution without a conviction, and for immigration, employment and travel that is a materially different outcome. Our page on peace bonds in Ontario covers how they are negotiated and what conditions usually attach.

The family court running beside the criminal case, and where the two collide

Two courts. Two files. Two judges. Nobody co-ordinating them. That is the actual arrangement, and it produces most of the practical chaos in these cases.

Information flows one way more easily than the other. The directive tells prosecutors that they should have regard to the existence of any family court orders, and it lists a pending or actual separation among the risk factors relevant to bail. So the family situation feeds into the criminal decision. The reverse does not happen automatically, and a family court judge may know nothing about your bail conditions unless somebody puts them in front of him.

Where the two systems collide, in order of how often we see it:

• The house. A geographic condition keeping you away from the family home decides, in practical terms, who lives in it. That happens within hours, and months before a family court would consider anything like exclusive possession under section 24 of the Family Law Act.
• The children. A no-contact condition that names a child, or one that keeps you away from an address, can suspend your contact with your children before any family court has looked at parenting at all.
• The exchanges. Where communication with the other parent is prohibited, handovers have to run through a third party or a supervised setting, and that arrangement has to be built into both files rather than improvised at the door.
• The narrative. Statements, affidavits and materials produced in one proceeding have a way of turning up in the other.

A family court can also make a restraining order, under section 46 of the Family Law Act where the parties are or were spouses or partners, or under section 35 of the Children's Law Reform Act against any person. That is a different instrument from a criminal bail condition and is enforced differently. Having both in place at once is common and needs handling carefully, because the terms are rarely identical.

The working rule is that the two files have to be run together by people who speak to each other. A family lawyer who does not know what your bail conditions say will propose a parenting schedule that puts you in breach of them. A criminal lawyer who does not know a family application has been issued will consent to a condition that quietly costs you your position in it. If you are separating as well as facing a charge, our page on going through a separation sets out the family side of the same timeline.

When a children's aid society gets involved, and who told them

This is the institution people least expect and worry about most, and the referral usually comes from inside the justice system rather than from a neighbour or a school.

The directive is explicit that prosecutors shall report to child protection agencies any case where they have reasonable suspicion that a child is, or may be, in need of protection. Police attending a home where children were present may make their own report, and section 125(1) of the Child, Youth and Family Services Act, 2017 puts a duty on anyone who has reasonable grounds to suspect a child is in need of protection to report it to a society. So the question people ask, which is how did they find out, generally has a straightforward answer.

An agency opening a file is not a finding against you and it is not a criminal proceeding. It is a separate process, with its own workers, its own standards and its own timelines, and it can run whether or not the criminal charge ever succeeds. It can also continue after a criminal charge is withdrawn.

Four things matter practically:

• The agency file is separate from the criminal file, and what you say to a worker does not carry the protections people assume it does.
• Co-operating and making admissions are different things. Get advice before an interview, not after it.
• Bail conditions and agency expectations can contradict each other. A worker asking you to attend a meeting at an address you are barred from attending is a real and frequent problem, and it gets solved on paper rather than by improvising on the day.
• Children who were exposed to violence between adults are treated as directly affected rather than as bystanders who happened to be upstairs.

Our page on children's aid in Canada explains how the process runs and what the early steps look like.

The decision maker you never appear before: how immigration law reads a domestic conviction

The last institution on the map never sees you, never hears your side, and can undo everything the criminal court thought it had settled.

Section 36(1)(a) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act makes a permanent resident or a foreign national inadmissible for serious criminality where they have been convicted in Canada of an offence under an Act of Parliament punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least ten years, or of an offence for which a term of imprisonment of more than six months has been imposed.

Section 36(2)(a) makes a foreign national inadmissible for criminality where convicted in Canada of an offence punishable by way of indictment, or of two offences under any Act of Parliament not arising out of a single occurrence.

And now the provision that catches almost everybody. Section 36(3)(a) says an offence that may be prosecuted either summarily or by way of indictment is deemed to be an indictable offence, even if it has been prosecuted summarily.

Read that against a hybrid charge, which is what most domestic charges are. A Crown election to proceed summarily is treated by everyone in the courtroom as good news, and for sentencing purposes it usually is. It does not, by itself, protect a foreign national under section 36(2)(a), because the offence is deemed indictable regardless of how it was prosecuted. What matters far more is the maximum penalty attached to the offence and the sentence that is actually imposed.

Two limits are worth knowing. Section 36(3)(b) provides that inadmissibility may not be based on a conviction for which a record suspension has been ordered and not revoked, or where there has been a final determination of an acquittal. Section 36(3)(e)(iii) excludes an offence for which the person received a youth sentence under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

The consequence for how a case gets defended is direct and it is not subtle. Where status is in play, the right resolution is not always the one producing the shortest sentence. It may be the one that avoids a conviction altogether, or the one that produces a particular sentence rather than a slightly shorter one. That has to be identified at the start of the file, not discovered at the end of it. Tell your lawyer about your immigration status at the first meeting, before anything is agreed. Our page on deportation risks after a criminal conviction covers the immigration side in more detail.

And the rest of your life

A charge, and much more so a conviction, can reach into employment, travel and volunteering. How far it reaches depends entirely on what you do and where you do it, and it is worth mapping out early with somebody who knows your situation rather than finding out at the worst possible moment. That is a conversation to have at the beginning, when the outcome can still be shaped.

Why people facing a domestic charge call Kazandji Law

Domestic files are decided in places most people never see. In the wording of a synopsis. In a bail plan put together in an afternoon. In whether a variation request lands with a proposal attached or with an apology. Knowing which institution holds which decision is the difference between spending months pushing on the wrong door and spending that time on the door that opens.

We act for people at every stage of this: the person still at the station, the family trying to arrange a surety by nine the next morning, the person who has been on conditions for six months and needs them changed, and the person whose real problem is not the sentence but their status in this country. Fadi Matthew Kazandji leads the firm, and files are handled by a lawyer rather than passed down.

Four offices across the Greater Toronto Area

• Toronto (head office): 180 John Street, Unit 320, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1X5, close to the downtown courts.
• Thornhill: 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, serving Markham, Vaughan, Richmond Hill and the rest of York Region.
• North York: for clients in the north end of the city.
• Oakville: for Halton and the western end of the GTA.

If somebody is in custody right now, call. Bail plans are built faster with a lawyer asking the right questions of the right people, and the first appearance is not the moment to be improvising one.

Questions people actually ask

The information on this page is general and is not legal advice. Outcomes in domestic files turn on the specific allegation, the record, the evidence and the conditions imposed, and policies and legislation change over time. Reading this page does not create a solicitor and client relationship with Kazandji Law. If you have been charged, or you are subject to conditions, get advice about your own situation before you act. If you are in immediate danger, call 911.