Sexual violence scars Native American women

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/03/201334111633172507.html

<snip>

Indigenous women in the US experience some of the highest rates of sexual assault in the country. According to the US Department of Justice, nearly half of all Native American women have been raped, beaten, or stalked by an intimate partner; one in three will be raped in their lifetime; and on some reservations, women are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than the national average.

While the numbers are staggering, the reality that advocates such as Brunner see in their work and communities exposes the depth of the crisis.

One of the services that Brunner provides through a group she runs, the Sacred Spirits First Nations Coalition, is outreach to local teenagers. She recalls what one young girl told her about rape: "My mom and I already talked about that. When I'm raped, we won't report it, because we know nothing will happen. We don't want to cause problems for our family."

<snip>

"There is a history of racism and oppression for native women which makes predators think somehow we are vulnerable and that we're not protected by the system," said Sarah Deer, a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota and member of the Muscogee Creek Nation. "So you maybe have a hate crime component of this along with a jurisdictional problem."

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[niyad]

1. k and r

[kdmorris]

2. I watched a show on Current called "Rape on the Reservation"

It was eye-opening and horrific. They were talking to Lakotas on a reservation in South Dakota and the statistics were staggering. I think I remember that 70% of the women (don't quote me on that) on that reservation will be raped in their lifetime and almost none of them are reported. Most of the rapes were committed by Native American men.

I cried through most of the show.

[Starry Messenger]

3. This article reports that the DOJ has statistics that 86% of the rapes are committed by non-native

men. The lack of punishment makes native women a vulnerable target. It is hideous. The Republicans tried to strip protections for native women out of VAWA. Sickening.

[kdmorris]

4. I wonder if that differs by reservation.. probably not

since it's a DOJ report.

I saw them trying to strip that out... yikes - what assholes. I'm not saying that all victims of domestic/sexual violence don't need help, but it seems like it's an epidemic on the reservations.

[Starry Messenger]

5. Yeah, that seemed like an exceptionally low thing to do, even for House Reps.

They have abandoned any semblance of human decency. Here's more from a recent NYT article by Louise Erdrich:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/opinion/native-americans-and-the-violence-against-women-act.html

<snip>

The Justice Department reports that one in three Native women is raped over her lifetime, while other sources report that many Native women are too demoralized to report rape. Perhaps this is because federal prosecutors decline to prosecute 67 percent of sexual abuse cases, according to the Government Accountability Office. Further tearing at the social fabric of communities, a Native woman battered by her non-Native husband has no recourse for justice in tribal courts, even if both live on reservation ground. More than 80 percent of sex crimes on reservations are committed by non-Indian men, who are immune from prosecution by tribal courts.

The Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center says this gap in the law has attracted non-Indian habitual sexual predators to tribal areas. Alexandra Pierce, author of a 2009 report on sexual violence against Indian women in Minnesota, has found that there rapes on upstate reservations increase during hunting season. A non-Indian can drive up from the cities and be home in five hours. The tribal police can’t arrest him.

To protect Native women, tribal authorities must be able to apprehend, charge and try rapists — regardless of race. Tribal courts had such jurisdiction until 1978, when the Supreme Court ruled that they did not have inherent jurisdiction to try non-Indians without specific authorization from Congress. The Senate bill would restore limited jurisdiction over non-Indians suspected of perpetrating sex crimes, but even this unnerves some officials. “You’ve got to have a jury that is a reflection of society as a whole, and on an Indian reservation, it’s going to be made up of Indians, right?” said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “So the non-Indian doesn’t get a fair trial.”

Leaving aside the fact that most Native defendants tried in the United States face Indian-free juries, and disregarding the fulsome notion that Native people can’t be impartial jurists, Mr. Grassley got his facts wrong. Most reservations have substantial non-Indian populations, and Native families are often mixed. The Senate version guarantees non-Indians the right to effective counsel and trial by an impartial jury.

<snip>

(Grassley sounds like someone lifted him right out of the 19th century.)

[Rhiannon12866]

7. Wow! Sounds both interesting and worthwhile.

Thanks so much for the information and welcome to DU!

[Lunacee_2013]

8. About the hate crime aspect ...

which is in the last line of your post, I think ALL rape should be considered a hate crime. It's a hateful act and it tends to target just one particular group of people. If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck....