Issues Related to the High Number of Murdered and Missing Women in Canada

Isn't that interesting?

I went looking online for a copy of the report by the Coordinating Committee of Senior Officials Missing Women Working Group - "Issues Related to the High Number of Murdered and Missing Women in Canada" (MMWC) which was published in September 2010. It was - for a bit - available on the Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat website - but no more.

A few links of interest remain, however:

• There is a (very) short synopsis posted by the Ministry of the Attorney General in British Columbia


• here is a brief discussion which occured in the House of Commons on October 26, 2010


• and here is my personal favourite - the one in which the Canadian government announces in a press release that they care about violence against Aboriginal women in Canada and are prepared to throw $10 million at it.

So generous - except for the ~minor~ little details that they don't mention - which if one reads - critically - the press release, the above mentioned report - MMWC - in conjunction with any of the research reports provided by the Sisters in Spirit Initiative - jump out relatively quickly.

Things like the fact that while the SIS research is extremely nuanced, and recognizes that the only commonalities between all of the missing & murdered women they are researching is that they are 1. Aboriginal 2. women 3. missing or murdered 4. in Canada. (And they do note concern about non-Aboriginal women, or about Aboriginal women who die or are harmed through other causes, also - but since those are not the subject of this particular research project, they are not included in the research database)

The only commonalities between the people directly responsible for their deaths/disappearances are ...well, none, actually, beyond the fact that they were presumably in Canada long enough to commit crimes here. Offenders are not all male, nor all Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, nor are they all serial offenders.

The report of the MMWC, on the other hand, considers Aboriginal women who are missing or murdered in Canada and who are most often

• living in poverty
• homeless, transient, and lacking in social networks
• addicted to alcohol or drugs
• involved in sex work or other dangerous practices such as hitchhiking
• experiencing mental health issues (MWWG 3)

And the offenders about which they are concerned do share a ~few~ commonalities. They are

• male
• serial sex offenders
• predators
• follow a pattern of repeated abduction, infliction of assault, degredation, torture and murder.

So - we can ~throw out~ all of those women who are not killed by strangers - that's all but approximately 17% of cases where the offenders are known, using the SIS research. We can ~throw out~ all the cases where the women are not involved in sex work (about half of the women about whom enough is known to make this determination). And hey, lets throw out any one-offs, also, because we are only interested in serial offenders.

Another very important difference between the Sisters in Spirit report(s) and the MMWG is that one is very clearly in favour of an approach with attention paid to being both PROACTIVE and REACTIVE strategies to reduce the number of missing or murdered Aboriginal women in Canada, while the other - in spite of the occassional nod towards the need to prevent these crimes in the first place, is quite clearly concerned to a very large extent with the REACTIVE side of things. Care to guess which organization advocates for which approach? Too easy?

The goals of the MWWG were to:

• Share information and expertise with personnel across Canada who are responsible for identifying, investigating and prosecuting these cases
• Develop strategies and proposals that would assist in addressing current barriers that hinder the resolution of cases involving victims of serial predators
• Promote the development of resources and training to assist personnel who are responsible for handing cases of missing and murdered persons
• Ensure that the Criminal Code and other relevant federal and provincial legislation provide the best tools for investigating and prosecuting cases of serial killers who target marginalized persons (3)

See any proactive approaches in there? Yeah, me neither. Training and changes to the Criminal Code are all well and good - and one could, I suppose, make an argument that these are proactive - but they are proactive only in the sense that they set up strategies that can be used when "these cases" happen - none of these are proactive in the sense of gee, I dunno, looking for root causes and strategies to ensure that women don't wind up missing or murdered in the first place?

But of course, we are talking about people who are up there in the judicial - and especially policing - system - of course they are focussing on cases - and so they should be. Their work, however, does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that replaces the work of the Sisters in Spirit Iniative's research or victim support work, however.

Absolutely nothing...

And yet Harper & co would have you believe that while the Sisters in Spirit did good work, they are all set to handle it from here.

Even if that were true, I would have a problem with it. We are supposedly living in a post-colonial society.

In a post-colonial society, if a group of Aboriginal peoples have proven themselves capable of researching and working on a problem that impacts on Aboriginal peoples - and motivated to keep doing so - does the state swoop in and take it over? Really?

Honestly, it seems just a ~little~ ... okay ... a LOT... colonial to me. Am I, perhaps, missing something?

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Canadian Outrage

A couple of weeks ago, in one of my classes, we watched a film called American Outrage, about the Dann sisters, elderly Shoshone women whose animals got in the way of a gold mine. The US government subjected them to repeated harassment, charging them with trespassing (on SHOSHONE land as per the Treaty of Ruby Valley) and rounding up and stealing their stock, and spending millions of dollars in their campaign against them. The Dann sisters fought back - took it all the way to the Supreme Court and the United Nations....and even though they won - over and over again - nothing much has changed. Almost 30 years of fighting for what is RIGHT. Ludicrous.

I wish I could say that such things don't happen in Canada. After all, we Canadians have apologized to our native peoples, eh? So we must be ever so much better than the U.S. right?

NOT.

We apologized...but that doesn't mean that we have stopped behaving badly.

How long before we apologize for depriving the Algonquins of Barriere Lake of the money the Canadian government has been withholding since 2001? For once again imposing our will on them and engaging in deliberate attempts to undermine them at every turn?

When are we going to apologize to our missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada? We cut the funding for the Sisters in Spirit Initiative research - do you know why? I do. The same reason we are ending the long form census in Canada.

The Canadian government does not want us to know how many Aboriginal women go missing, or how many children live in poverty, or how many Canadian women work without wages or....

If we don't know about any of the problems they do not exist. The Harper government strategy for everything. Vanish the statistics. Ta dah! Problem solved. Magic!!!!

We can point to the apology that Harper made to our Aboriginal peoples all we want - it means NOTHING if the abuse does not stop.

It is not enough to close the residential schools and apologize if we turn around and find other ways to abuse our Aboriginal peoples. Five new prisons! And Aboriginal peoples are the fastest growing population in our prisons - a trend that we EXPECT to continue according to everything I have read.

Why do we expect it to continue? Why is it so acceptable that even the Human Rights Commission, in their 2005 report "A Matter of Rights", just presents it as fact, without even questioning it, or, gee, I don't know - maybe suggesting that THIS IS A PROBLEM?

Aboriginal people are already over-represented in our prison populations - and now we're planning to build new prisons to lock up more of them and that's okay cuz hey, we only promised to end residential schools.

We can talk about decolonization all we want - it is only talk. And it is an outrage.

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