Statistic on killers of aboriginal women at best 'unhelpful,' at worst 'offensive,' say advocates

The federal government is trying to abdicate responsibility for the high number of aboriginal women who have been murdered or gone missing in Canada by blaming First Nations, say advocates for a public inquiry.

RCMP Comm. Bob Paulson confirmed Friday a statistic first cited by Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt in a closed-door meeting with chiefs last month: that 70 per cent of murdered Aboriginal women whose cases have been solved were killed by other Aboriginal people.

It’s a statistic in line with female homicides in any ethnic group, says Dawn Harvard, acting president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada. Most women are killed by people known to them.

“That’s just a general pattern that holds true for everybody. The real issue here is not the ethnicity of the offender,” Harvard tells Yahoo Canada News.

“It’s not only irrelevant but it’s offensive that it’s being used as an excuse not to address the issue, to minimize the concern for our women.”

An RCMP report released last year that found at least 1,181 Indigenous women and girls were murdered or went missing in Canada between 1980 and 2012.

That report did not say how many murders were committed by aboriginal perpetrators.

What it did say was that most homicides of aboriginal and non-aboriginal women were committed by men and most of the perpetrators knew their victims.

“Female homicide victims generally know the person who kills them – more than 90 per cent had a previous relationship with them. This is true for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal female victims,” the report said.

Aboriginal women were more likely to be murdered by an acquaintance – 30 per cent compared to 29 per cent of non-aboriginal women. Yet they were less likely to be killed by a spouse – 29 per cent, compared to 41 per cent, the report says.

It is unacceptable that RCMP and the federal government waited until this late stage of the discussion on missing and murdered Indigenous women to release this information, says the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations.

“The level of violence experienced by Indigenous women and girls, and the inadequate measures taken to protect, investigate and prosecute, is a national crisis,” Perry Bellegarde writes in a letter to Paulson.

“The RCMP and federal government must work with First Nations to address this as a priority. An obvious place to start is sharing information, data and analysis.”

Both the national police force and the federal government were part of a national roundtable on the issue in February, Bellegarde points out.

“There is a long history of mistrust of police by First Nations and citizens,” he writes. “Withholding information only serves to damage relationships and foster suspicion, especially when that information is shared with government agencies or representatives who seem willing to use that information against First Nations to deny or diminish the action required.”

Bellegarde requested a meeting with the RCMP commissioner.

In a statement, he says the federal government must recognize the root causes of poverty and work with First Nations to address the poor conditions and lack of supports available for Indigenous Canadians, including men’s health programs.

Harvard points out that

Many, if not most, of the women on the list of murdered and missing were not killed on reserves, she points out, but were living in urban centres.

“They may be First Nations people but this isn’t an on-reserve issue,” she says.

Ted Palys, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University, says there is a lot of missing data on missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada.

Releasing this statistic without further information on how they came up with it or what proportion of cases have conclusive evidence “especially given the political ramifications of this statistic, is not helpful,” Palys tells Yahoo Canada News.

“In terms of the implications for an inquiry, Prime Minister Harper’s justification for not holding one has been that ‘this is not a sociological problem.’ The RCMP statistic and all the questions it raises suggest even more strongly that there are strong sociological dimensions to the problem and hence that his justification does not hold water,” Palys says.

Advocates continue to press for a full public inquiry.