How much longer will we look the other way?

A march was held in Edmonton on Saturday to remember and raise awareness about the hundreds of Aboriginal women who have gone missing in Western Canada over the past two decades. This year's march marked the 2nd Annual Stolen Sisters Awareness Walk and was led by the mothers of Nina Courtepatte and Rachel Quinney, two slain Aboriginal teenagers from the Edmonton area.

Aboriginal women in Canada are five times more likely to be murdered than women of any other ethnicity. Over the past 20 years, more than 500 Aboriginal women in Western Canada have gone missing or been murdered. Although statistics like this are sobering, it seems to me that as a society we don't truly understand the implications of these numbers. If we did, we would be doing a lot more to prevent them from happening.

It is all too easy for each of us to see a headline or hear a news report that another young Aboriginal woman's life has been cut short, and with all but the slightest pause for sadness or regret, continue on with our daily routines. This process is particularly easy when victims are identified as having led a 'high-risk lifestyle.' It's as if while we may be shocked or even somewhat horrified to hear about the disappearance of another young woman or the discovery of another brutalized body in our city's suburban backyard, the revelation that the victim was believed to be a sex worker, drug user, or even simply Aboriginal, is enough to lull us back into our collective indifference and dispel any sense of outrage, safe with the assurance this couldn't happen to women we love.

There are several problems with this 'high-risk' designation, which I think are important and need to be unpacked if we are to truly understand the need for action on our part.

1. Often and particularly, in conversations around initiatives like Project KARE, the Highway of Tears task force, and even when thinking about the Stolen Sisters report, the identies of 'high-risk' and Aboriginal are conflated to mean the same thing. This ignores the fact that many of the missing Aboriginal women, were not in fact leading 'high-risk lifestyles'; however the indifference we feel toward these cases is nonetheless the same.
2. As eh has previously posted on, labeling the victims of violence as 'high-risk' implicitly places blame squarely on the shoulders of the murdered or missing young women and removes the focus from the men trolling our streets looking for the next victim.
3. Designating women as having been involved in 'high-risk' lifestyles obscures the fact that these women are mothers, daughters, sisters, cousins, and nieces and have relationships with other human beings who will be adversely impacted by their disappearance. Many of the people involved in Saturday's march were there in remembrance of a friend of family member they lost and these people deserve the same level of societal concern as the families of any other missing person.
4. Relatedly, labeling missing and murdered women as 'high-risk' removes the context from their lives.  It absolves the media from asking important questions about how a person got to the point where they have become 'high-risk', it conceals the cycles of abuse and violence that have impacted the lives of many of these women and most tragically, it completely dehumanizes these women to the point of being just another statistic or blip on the radar.

Seeing the epidemic of violence affecting Aboriginal women from a new (non-mainstream media) perspective is crucial to our finding the anger necessary to break with our collective indifference, to demand that our lawmakers do more to end the violence, and ensure that Aboriginal woman enjoy the same rights and privileges as every other citizen of this country. If you would like to learn more about this issue, take a look at the Amnesty International 'Stolen Sisters' report (or even just check out the site) that finally forced us to acknowledge there was a problem. There is also a sobering documentary by the same name that appeared on Global in October -- any of them will make you angry.

Comments

[Jewel]

Thanks for posting about this dudette. It's so gdamn important and yet so often forgotten, as you pointed out.

Even here in O-Town, Jennifer Teague (a white womny) was murdered and it made the national news. Kelly Morrisseau, an Aboriginal womyn with a history of sex work, was found dead in Gatineau park and they still haven't gotten any leads nor have they even attempted to make it a national headline. Not to mention the fact that the reward for any tips is a 1/3 of what it was for Jenn Teague when she was missing.

I do not wish to diminish the life of Ms. Teague because she was murdered and that's shitty, but Kelly Morrisseau was a mother and PREGNANT when she was murdered and people could care less. That's crap.