A walk in honour of Marlene Bird and missing aboriginal women was held on July 9, 2014 in Saskatoon. Photo: RICHARD MARJAN/Postmedia News/Files The murder of any human being is a crime, and a tragedy. It is the subject of society’s strictest taboo and severest penalty, and yet every year hundreds of Canadians are murdered. Some of these, roughly 40 per year, are aboriginal women.
What is it about their murders, alone among the rest, that justifies the demands, now heard on all sides, for a public inquiry? The idea is not objectionable in itself. The prime minister’s abrupt dismissal of the suggestion — “we should not view this as a sociological phenomenon” — is almost cartoonishly simplistic. Every crime is the product both of the choice of a culpable individual and of the social circumstances that shaped him; where we see large numbers of individuals in similar circumstances committing the same crime, it is only common sense to investigate the possibility of a link between the two.
In this file photo, Paningvak Kruse, Aili Liimakka Laue and Sarah Jancke, hold pictures of Loretta Saunders at the vigil. (Julie Oliver/Ottawa Citizen)
But that’s true of all crime, not just murders of aboriginal women. What is it about this crime in particular that singles it out, not just for the usual academic and government research that one presumes attends most crimes, but for the kind of urgent, crisis-level attention signalled by a public inquiry? Is it that the murder rate among aboriginal women has been rising, rapidly or over time? But it isn’t, and hasn’t been. As last May’s RCMP report (Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women: A National Operational Overview) made clear, it has been falling for the past 30 years: 40 per cent between 1996 and 2011 alone.
Is it that the murders of aboriginal women are treated less seriously by police? Not on the evidence. According to the same report, the “solve rate” for murder cases involving aboriginal women, across all police forces, is the same as for non-aboriginal women, at roughly 90 per cent.
Is it that the murder rate among aboriginal women is especially high, compared with other groups? Yes it is, when compared with non-aboriginal women: Aboriginal women now make up more than 20 per cent of all female murder victims, twice the proportion of 30 years ago, and five times their share of the female population. But that’s not because more aboriginal women are being murdered. It’s because fewer non-aboriginal women are. While the murder rate for aboriginal women has dropped, among non-aboriginal women it has dropped even faster.
In this file photo, Laureen Harper (centre) visited the Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health. (Pat McGrath/The Ottawa Citizen)
Still, that aboriginal women are five times more likely to be murdered than non-aboriginal women is obviously an outrage and a disgrace. But if so, the murder rate among aboriginal men is surely twice as outrageous and disgraceful. For indeed, the murder rate among aboriginal men is more than twice as high as it is for aboriginal women. Strangely, this never seems to come up; where it is mentioned, it is mostly in passing, as if not to interrupt the narrative of a unique wrong having been committed against aboriginal women.
As it happens, the ratio of men to women among aboriginal murder victims closely mirrors that among the general population. (The RCMP report notes, vaguely, that “females represented 32% of homicide victims” in the period studied. Hmm. And who could the other 68 per cent be?) Not only are men in general more than twice as likely as women to be murdered, they are disproportionately likely to be the victims of most forms of serious violent crime, from aggravated assault to assault causing bodily harm to robbery and extortion. (The exceptions are criminal harassment, forcible confinement and, of course, sexual assault, more than 90 per cent of whose victims are women.)
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is joined by Minister of Aboriginal Affairs Bernard Valcourt and Minister of Environment Leona Aglukkaq in this file photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
What we have then, is not a problem affecting aboriginal women, in particular, but aboriginal people, men and women. Both suffer vastly disproportionate rates of murder and other crimes of violence compared with their non-aboriginal counterparts. It is not clear why the murders of aboriginal women should merit our special attention and concern, and not the murders of aboriginal men, even if the latter, like men generally, are also disproportionately the perpetrators.
Nor is it clear what matters a public inquiry would cover that are not already well-trodden ground. What questions would it ask that have not already been asked, and answered, a dozen times or more? From the RCMP report, we have a good idea who their murderers are: in more than 90 per cent of cases, they are known to or indeed related to the victim. We know why they did it: in more than half the cases, as a result of an “argument or quarrel” or “frustration, rage and despair.” We know where: three-quarters of the time, in a residence. We know how: beatings (32 per cent) and stabbings (31 per cent) predominate.
More broadly, the surrounding social circumstances identified in the RCMP report will surprise no one: from unemployment to substance abuse to chronic violence and abuse. The dysfunction that afflicts many (but by no means all) aboriginal communities has been amply documented, as have its causes, from economic deprivation to the devastating legacy of the residential schools to the cultural trauma of colonialism generally.
The broad project of repairing that social destruction should absolutely be among the first of our concerns as a country, with aboriginal people themselves very much taking the lead. It is not evident what contribution another public inquiry would make to that end.
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