Aboriginal women and girls are among the most vulnerable in
Canadian society.[10] Statistics show that they are significantly disadvantaged, particularly with
regard to access to housing, education and employment. Aboriginal women and
girls are also more likely than their non-Aboriginal counterparts to be victims
of violence both within the family unit and outside their home.
Violence against Aboriginal women and girls is a serious concern
for us all. The Committee learned that many of them are exposed to violence on
a daily basis. Throughout our study, witnesses discussed the many factors that increase
the vulnerability of Aboriginal women and girls. These factors, discussed in
the next chapter, are complex and interrelated.
From the outset,
it is important to mention that the statistics available in Canada on violence against Aboriginal women and girls reflect only part of a much more serious problem. The scope of the violence is not fully understood nor is
it quantified. The under-reporting of incidents of violent victimization, particularly in cases of domestic violence, is a long
recognized problem in Canada. However, under-reporting is probably a more serious problem in the case at hand
because of the historically strained relationship between the police and Aboriginal communities and the difficulty still today that members of these communities have trusting police and believing the police
will protect them.
Police were viewed in those days as the people who
came and took the children away. We’re still living with that. We’re still
trying to convince communities that we are there to support and help them. The
residual effect of those beliefs is still common in a lot of our communities,
so it’s an uphill battle for us to convince them that we need to move beyond that.[11]
Year after year, data released by Statistics Canada shows that
Aboriginal women and girls are more likely to be victims of violence than their
non-Aboriginal counterparts.
One manifestation of this violence is the violence done to them in
their own homes. The General Social Survey (GSS)[12] of 2009 found that, like in 1999 and in 2004,[13] the rate of domestic violence targeting Aboriginal women is at least twice what
it is in the general population.[14] The survey also found that Aboriginal women who were victims of domestic
violence reported injuries more often than non-Aboriginal women. They are also
more likely to say they fear for their lives.
Violence against Aboriginal women and girls is largely perpetrated
by an acquaintance of the victim, usually a man. This situation is similar to
that of non-Aboriginal women. However, Aboriginal women and girls are much more
likely than their non-Aboriginal counterparts to be victims of violence at the
hands of strangers who take advantage of their vulnerabilities.
All forms of violence combined, the GSS shows that:
- Aboriginal women are three times more likely to be the target of violent victimization than non-Aboriginal women;
- the majority of victims are Aboriginal women between 15 and 34
years old;[15]
- in many cases, the violence is not an isolated event, as more
than one-third of all Aboriginal female victims were victimized two or more
times.[16]
Based on data collected by the police, Aboriginal women are also
more likely to be murdered. Between 2004 and 2010, they accounted for at least
8% of homicide victims, despite accounting for 4% of the total female
population in Canada.[17]
Some witnesses told the Committee that Aboriginal women and girls
are also greatly over-represented as victims of commercial sexual exploitation.
Many of them work as prostitutes to support themselves and their children;
others are victims of trafficking and forced by pimps to work as prostitutes.
We know that sexual exploitation is present in
mining and resource extraction projects around the world. We're not sure yet of
what's happening in our communities. We've heard anecdotally of 42 Inuit women who have been trafficked
through Ottawa in the last four years. Trafficking routes include transit
across the Arctic, across the east coast of Canada, as well as to Las Vegas and
Miami.[18]
Diane Redsky, Project Director, Task Force on Trafficking of Women
and Girls in Canada, Canadian Women’s Foundation, argued that many girls in
Canada are first trafficked into forced prostitution when they are 13 years
old. She added:
Along this continuum, particularly for indigenous
women, is the horrifying reality that they are methodically targeted by
traffickers when they are teens and young women, their vulnerabilities are
exploited, and they become trapped in a life of absolute chaos, abuse, and
extreme violence.
It doesn't end there,
though. When they are no longer of value to a trafficker, they become the women
in the survival sex industry: 40 years old, poor, and dying.
Women's bodies are not equipped to handle the physical and psychological trauma
of being sexually exploited and trafficked, whether by circumstances or by
force.[19]
Kim Pate, Executive Director, Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry
Societies, told the Committee that we
have an obligation to
take all forms of violence against
Aboriginal women seriously, “including sexual violence, not just
in the family, not just in a domestic sphere, but also in the context of the
increased commodification of women and girls.”[20]
There is no official data on the number of missing
and murdered Aboriginal women and girls in Canada. The figure most commonly used to reflect the magnitude of this problem comes from research conducted by NWAC through its Sisters in Spirit initiative. This initiative, which received a federal
grant of $5 million over five years, was intended to address the root causes, circumstances and trends related to the disappearances and murders of Aboriginal women and girls and to raise public awareness about the violence against them.
This first initiative, which ended in 2010, identified 582 missing
or murdered Aboriginal women and girls across the country.[21] However, these are only the known cases. The actual number may be much higher,
according to NWAC’s Director of Safety and Violence Prevention, Irene Goodwin.[22]
The murders and disappearances of Aboriginal women and girls do not
belong to the past, insisted Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, the National Chief of the
Assembly of First Nations (AFN). He noted that this tragedy is still unfolding
today.
The circumstances of the murders and disappearances identified
through the Sisters in Spirit initiative are varied. Lisa Hitch of the
Department of Justice reminded the Committee that the cases:
range from the victims of serial killers … through
to domestic violence circumstances, family violence circumstances, cases where
women have died either crossing highways, because it's the only way to go home,
or have disappeared from highways. There are a lot of instances of women who
were fully employed and are missing or murdered, in circumstances that were
very different from the circumstances that were looked at in the Oppal
commission [British Columbia’s Missing Women Commission of Inquiry]. There were
a lot of young girls who were going to school. There are a number of instances
where people died of exposure.[23]
According to information gathered by NWAC, 70% of disappearances
and 60% of murders occurred in urban areas. Moreover 87% of missing or murdered
women and girls were mothers of at least one child.[24] This finding is troubling, especially since NWAC’s research shows a cycle in
which “a mother would go missing, and then the daughter would go missing years
later. In some particular family lines, several individuals have gone missing.”[25] These cases also impact the many children who now have to live without a
mother.
Of the 582 cases in the database, 39% occurred after 2000, while
17% occurred in the 1990s. Homicide charges were laid in only 53% of cases. In
other words, nearly half of these murder cases remain unsolved, a low
percentage compared with the Canadian average. According to data from the 2010
homicide survey, 75% of homicides were solved by police.[26]
The lack of progress in missing persons cases increases the
suffering of families who still hope for news. Charlene Belleau of the AFN told
the Committee about the impact of unsolved cases on victims’ families:
The alleged perpetrators in most cases are still
out there, because police haven’t been able to resolve those cases, so families
continue to live in trauma from the loss of their daughters.[27]
From the research gathered through the Sisters in Spirit
initiative, of the 261 known cases where criminal charges were laid, 23% of
women and girls were killed by a current or ex-partner and 6% by a family
member. Approximately 17% of these women and girls were killed by an
acquaintance and 16% by a stranger. Lastly, in half of the cases for which
information was available (149 cases), the missing women and girls were not
involved in prostitution.[28]
NWAC continues to gather information on new cases of missing or
murdered Aboriginal women and girls. However, it is difficult to collect
reliable data and conduct the necessary investigations to clarify the
circumstances of the disappearances and deaths and determine whether the victim
was Aboriginal if the victim’s ethnic identity was not already established. In
March 2013, NWAC put the number of cases of missing or murdered Aboriginal
women and girls at 668. In her appearance on 30 January 2014, a
representative of Human Rights Watch Canada, Liesl Gerntholtz, noted the
following about the number of missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls:
Recently published research indicates that the
number of missing and murdered indigenous women across Canada may be over 800,
but comprehensive data collection efforts are hampered by the fact that there
is currently no precedent for the standardized collection of ethnicity data by
police forces in Canada.[29]
Several witnesses called for the establishment of an independent
public inquiry into the issue of missing or murdered Aboriginal women in
Canada, adding their voices to those of leaders of national Aboriginal
organizations, premiers and leaders of provinces and territories and several
international organizations.[30]
Witnesses expressed
several objectives for the
desired independent public inquiry,
including:
- allowing victims’ friends and family to be heard and communities to start on the path toward reconciliation;
- educating the Canadian public about the root causes of violence
against Aboriginal women and girls;
- developing a coordinated national action plan to address such violence and its causes; and
- establishing benchmarks for evaluating initiatives aimed at
ending violence against Aboriginal women and girls in Canada.
Other witnesses, including Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada,
believe that the needs of Aboriginal communities are too dire to spend money on
establishing such a commission, saying it would be better to use the money to
fund community services and programs:
Every day, I hear stories about girls being raped
and girls being beaten — every day —and instead of the government spending
millions of dollars in hearings over the next couple of years, we need your
help now, today, to hear us as Aboriginal people, and to put some money into
the police forces to find who’s responsible for the violence, for the missing
and murdered women and girls.
We need funds and resources to develop awareness
and education programs on the reserves and in schools, programs about violence
and the missing and murdered women, because some of these women come from the
reserves. They have really big dreams of starting school, but they get grabbed
by a pimp and the next thing we see is that they’re in the newspaper because
they’ve been murdered.
What I’m asking for most is the protection from
violence for the women and children and to find who’s responsible for the
violence and the murdered women. The government and the police services have
the responsibility to provide justice for victims and end the violence.[31]
Following the completion of Sisters in Spirit in 2010, funding has
been provided through Evidence to Action and Evidence to Action II, to build on
the information learned through the first project and to support communities in
their response to the root causes of violence against Aboriginal women and
girls. A number of witnesses criticized the decision not to continue funding
for the original project.[32]
In Budget 2010, the Government announced that it would
establish a national database for missing persons and unidentified remains as
part of the new Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) National Centre for Missing
Persons and Unidentified Remains. Even though such a database would obviously
be helpful in solving missing persons and murder cases, some witnesses said
they feared that this database will not adequately capture the Aboriginal
identity of the victims. The NWAC representatives stressed that there are
“substantial gaps in the collection by the RCMP of information on the
Aboriginal identity of victims, which makes this a poor source of information.”[33]
Lynn Barr-Telford, a Statistics Canada official, noted that police
officers do not often collect information on Aboriginal identity because of the
operational difficulties of definitively establishing a victim’s background and
conflicts between privacy legislation and policing policies. Rebecca Kong,
Chief of Statistics Canada’s Correctional Services Program, also spoke about
Aboriginal people’s reluctance to share this information with police,
emphasizing the following:
Part of that is having the community buy-in and
having public relations and public education campaigns to explain to the
indigenous people there the advantages of providing that information.
The issue of collecting
information on Aboriginal identity of victims through police-reported data had
been long-standing. From 2001 to 2010, Statistics Canada worked with partners
in the policing community and in the ministries across the country to try to
improve the information. We tried to put in place some recommendations. We did
some consultations with communities in Saskatchewan. In the end, there were
still issues regarding internal policing policies around providing the data and
concerns about the quality of the information based on visual identification.
There were also concerns in terms of the actual collection of the information
and whether that question is always asked.[34]
A number of witnesses expressed concern about this lack of reliable
data on the Aboriginal identity of victims. They believe that police officers
should systematically collect information on the Aboriginal identity of victims
and alleged perpetrators. Such information would provide a better picture of
the experience of Aboriginal women and girls in the justice system and
contribute to finding solutions that meet their needs. Ms. Porteous, Executive
Director of the Ending Violence Association of British Columbia, pointed out
during her appearance that “we need to have that information if we’re going to
be developing appropriate and useful public policy.”[35] In the same vein, Mr. Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, National Chief of the AFN, said the following: “Police
services need to work together to produce verifiable numbers on incidents of
violence against Indigenous women and girls so that progress can be measured.”[36]