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Abstract
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We are social epidemiologists and community advocates focused on addressing social determinants of health inequities. While we appreciate O'Neill et al's effort to link multiple provincial-level administrative data sets to examine homicide victimisation by immigration status in Ontario, Canada, we have concerns about the framing and interpretation of findings and their potential impact on immigrants and refugees.
FRAMING AND APPROACH
While O'Neill et al's data and sample size are strengths, the attention to the context of being an immigrant to Canada, theoretical framework and motivation for examining immigrants in relation to homicide victimisation are not fully developed. O'Neill et al do not acknowledge having done any community engagement which is critical and ethical2 given the long history of exclusion, exploitation, racism and discrimination, and the current global climate of increasing criminalisation of migrants. Meaningful community engagement offers important context; helps shape the research purpose, questions, approach, interpretation and recommendations; and can reduce the potential for harm.
Though criminalisation of migration under security pretexts is an infringement of international law,3 and contradicts evidence that immigration is related to a reduction in crime,4 many high-income countries, including Canada, are framing harmful immigration policy (eg, restricting entry, detaining immigrants) as an urgent need to protect against threats of safety and security,4 5 disproportionately targeting racialised and Muslim immigrants and refugees. Within this policy context, along with political rhetoric to generate support for it, hate crimes are at record highs in Canada, with approximately 85% of these crimes motivated by racism and ethnic or religious discrimination.6
Not only does this paper fail to consider this context, the statements that immigrant communities are 'predisposed to violence' without evidence to support this claim; the conflation of perpetrating and dying by homicide, by alternating between the use of 'homicide' and 'homicide victimisation'; and the suggestion that 'cultural views on gender' increase risk of violence and homicide victimisation against immigrant women, are particularly harmful.
The authors' emphasis on the increased risk of homicide victimisation of female and male refugees compared to long-term residents is misleading given that these results are not statistically significant. The authors argue that the findings are important regardless of significance, because of large effect sizes. But for many researchers, effect sizes of 1.31 and 1.23, respectively, would be considered small to medium and would lead to a much more cautious interpretation.
The authors' interpretation that non-refugee immigrants have a lower risk of homicide victimisation because Canada's immigration policies select for highly educated and healthy immigrants reflects problems with the theory informing this research, since homicide victimisation is not within the control...
Language: en |