Ending violence against Aboriginal Women
PSAC Fact Sheet
National Aboriginal Peoples' Day, June 21, 2008
Sadly, the issue of violence against Aboriginal women has been prominent in the media in recent weeks. The remains of two young women were found within the span of a few days. Tashina General was pregnant when she went missing from her home on Six Nations Reserve in January. Her body was found ten days before the remains of Amber Redman were finally located on the Little Black Bear reserve in May. Amber had been missing since 2005.
As Amnesty International and the Native Women's Association of Canada point out, Aboriginal women are five times more likely to be murdered than other women in Canada. Along Highway 16 in Northern British Columbia, more than 40 women have gone missing or have been found murdered since 1974. Almost all the victims on the Highway of Tears are Aboriginal women.
The Native Women's Association of Canada's (NWAC) Sisters in Spirit initiative is in the midst of putting together a comprehensive database of murdered or missing Aboriginal women. As of December 2007, they had counted 487 cases. More than half of the women were under the age of 25 when they went missing.
A legacy of mistreatment
NWAC and Amnesty International point out that Aboriginal women and children tend to be more vulnerable to violence and abuse as a result of government policies that separated women and children from their communities and traditional support systems. Examples of these policies include taking away Aboriginal women's status under the Indian Act if they married a non-Aboriginal and forcing Aboriginal children into residential schools.
The outcome of these policies has been the erosion of culture, the displacement of generations of Aboriginal women, the separation of children from their parents, and a cycle of poverty that continues today.
Poverty is dangerous
The average annual income of Aboriginal women is $13,000, compared to $18,200 for Aboriginal men and to $19,350 for non-Aboriginal women. In 2000, 36 per cent of all Aboriginal women were classified as living in a household with incomes below Statistics Canada's Low Income Cut-off, otherwise known as the poverty line. These conditions have pushed many Aboriginal women into dangerous situations, extreme poverty, homelessness and the sex trade industry.
The results of Statistics Canada's 2004 General Social Survey, among several other studies, suggest that violence in marriages and common-law unions is a reality that too many Aboriginal women face. Indeed, 24 per cent of Aboriginal women experience spousal violence from either a current or previous marital or common-law partner. That figure is three times higher than the rates of domestic violence faced by non-Aboriginal women.
A matter of human rights
Violence against women is rarely understood as a human rights issue, but as Amnesty International points out, “when a woman is targeted for violence because of her gender or because of her Indigenous identity, her fundamental rights have been abused. And when she is not offered an adequate level of protection by state authorities because of her gender or her Indigenous identity, those rights have been violated.”
In the wake of the Pickton case, many police forces are beginning to understand that marginalized women often mistrust police officers. In the case of Aboriginal women, police forces were used in the past to enforce policies such as the removal of children to residential schools. And for women working in the sex trade, the fear of arrest often prevents them from reporting incidences of violence and mistreatment.
According to Amnesty International, the alarming number of missing or murdered Aboriginal women indicates the fact that police in Canada have often failed to provide them with an adequate standard of protection. But the blame shouldn't end there.
The federal government has a role to play in promoting the human rights of Aboriginal women. And recent actions by Stephen Harper's Conservative government point to an alarming lack of interest in women's safety and equality.
Since 2006, the Harper government has cancelled funding for universal daycare programs, and cut funding for women's groups who do research and advocacy work on violence and other issues . The Conservatives also dismantled the Court Challenges program, which provided disadvantaged groups with funding to take human rights challenges to court. On the international stage, the Canadian government refused to implement the Kelowna Accord or to sign onto the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Violence against Aboriginal women must be understood as a consequence of colonization, racism, dislocation and poverty. The federal government must listen to the voices of Aboriginal women and address how a legacy of mistreatment has led to the tragedy of missing or murdered Aboriginal women. Too many of our sisters have been stolen from us.
– Adapted from Amnesty International and the Native Women's Association of Canada's 2004 report, Stolen Sisters: A human rights response to discrimination and violence against indigenous women in Canada , with additional information from the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women and Statistics Canada.