Скачать или смотреть Why is violence against Indigenous women and girls everyone’s concern?

Robyn Bourgeois
Assistant Professor, Women's and Gender Studies
Faculty of Social Sciences

In 2015, Prime Minster Justin Trudeau called a National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. And that came after 40 years of activism on the part of Indigenous women. Over that period, there were significant numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across Canada. They are about four per cent of the population, but they make up about 15 to 20 per cent of the homicide cases in this country.

What we see in homicide is that, generally, people are killed interracially, so, if you’re a white person, you’re most likely to be killed by another white person. We are the only population that that’s not true for. And what we see is that we’re frequently killed by white men in particular.

We experience all forms of violence in really significant and disturbing numbers. Seventy-five per cent of us won’t reach the age of 18 without experiencing some form of sexual violence. We know that upwards of 80 per cent of us will experience some kind of interpersonal violence in our homes and we also know that Indigenous women and girls are targeted for sexual exploitation and human trafficking.

Indigenous women and girls have been targets for violence because they are extremely marginalized in our country and they are extremely vulnerable. They experience high rates of poverty, they live in overcrowded housing, they’re subject to racist and sexist stereotypes, they have fewer resources in terms of healthcare and support, and so it all creates this perfect storm where violence against Indigenous women and girls has become the norm in Canadian society.

Violence against Indigenous women and girls is actually a problem that everyone should be concerned about because the way this violence occurs is through dominant, interlocking social systems of oppression. The classics that we talk about – racism, colonialism, economic marginalization – work in and through one another to secure a global elite, which means that the violence experienced by Indigenous women and girls is intimately related to the violence experienced by all women and girls and we can’t effectively resolve one form of violence without effectively resolving them all. They are all interconnected because of these social systems of oppression that work in and through one another.

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