violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people

[everythingthelighttouches]

I thought this was entirely about sexual violence towards women? Wonder if any of those murdered or dissapeared didn't consider themselves women?

Who is doing this though? Is there a pattern?

TBH this is the problem I've had with the approach to this question, both from the government and indigenous groups.

There doesn't appear to be a "who" or some kind of individual or group or anything like that. The best hypothesis seems to be that native women are at a kind of nexus of vulnerable groups - the are more represented among run-aways, drug and alcohol addiction, prostitution, poverty, problems with the law, compared to other Canadian women. Do these along account for the higher rate of disappearances - well, we don't know. I suspect they account for a lot, but not all, of it.

Then there is the problem of police forces investigating. There seem to be more reason to think police forces have tended to ignore these cases, although it's again the case that they are also known to be rather lax at times in pursuing missing persons belonging to those other groups.

There's a real climate though that those kinds of questions aren't appropriate. I find it kind of depressing really, it seems like another case where an identity politics approach ends up looking at the surface issues in a way that obscures the more basic questions, like why indigenous women are so represented in those groups. I'm told this is a regressive POV.

Fermats

I don't think its an attempt to let men off the hook, at all. The blind spot is quite different.

Maybe part of the reason it's been approached this way is the case that really put this in the public eye was a serious of murders by a serial rapist and murderer. It turned out he had been picking up prostitutes for years, many of them indigenous - Vancouver has a large indigenous population, and murdering them on his farm, and then feeding the remains to his pigs. Just gruesome and also the kind of stuff that is really compelling news. The families of many of the women had been looking for them for years.
So in the mind of the public, perhaps it seemed like this was some kind of crazy conspiracy. And it was the exposure activists needed to start making demands, and the demand was for a public enquiry. But that seemed to be conceived in terms of uncovering a conspiracy in the mind of the public.

all the coverage is curiously lacking in any attempt to identify patterns in what theperpetratorsare doing. Again, men are strangely absent from the story, which is almost treated like an epidemic or natural disaster

The subject of the disappearance of indigenous Canadian women has had media attention on and off for about a decade now. I completely agree it is always treated with an air of puzzlement as if it were some mysterious plague or natural disaster.

mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1T41XF?utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A%2BTrending%2BContent&utm_content=5cf56d2f5f25b20001a151b0&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter&__twitter_impression=true

So, that article from reuters.

There are serious problems with indigenous issues in Canada. Not all simple ones either, or ones where there is a clear right or wrong. Some of it is a real morass.

But the way they are using the term colonialism in that article reminds me of nothing so much as the way the word "racism" was used at Evergreen.

I lived in the west of Canada in the 1970s and the contempt for the Indigenous people was palpable.

They had also been seriously damaged by being forceably sent to boarding schools from the age of five to fifteen all through the first half of the twentieth century.

all the coverage is curiously lacking in any attempt to identify patterns in what theperpetratorsare doing. Again, men are strangely absent from the story, which is almost treated like an epidemic or natural disaster**

Indeed. I live in Canada and this is in the news very regularly, constantly at the moment. What is never named is male violence. I don't think I have ever heard men referenced in relation to the inquiry. It's really quite bizarre.

Another contentious issue is that the background of the men perpetrating this violence is never discussed. The evidence from solved murders indicates that about 70% are perpetrated by indigenous men, mostly from the women's families and communities (as I would guess to be the case across the board when women are murdered). My cynical take is that this has been buried as it doesn't play into the desired narrative.

This article is one of the only ones available that highlights the statistics about offenders. Obviously in the majority of cases (missing and unsolved murders) we don't know.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-says-7-of-10-female-aboriginal-homicides-committed-by-aboriginal-offenders-1.3028150

That code thing in the title looks like one of my passwords at work...I was just about to shout gdpr breach!