Absolutely, and that's at the core of my work.
I'm sorry. I rushed through my statement. My work examined the sentencing of indigenous women, and at the heart of my work was a feminist theory called the victimization-criminalization continuum, which recognizes the relationship between experiences of victimization and then the criminalization and ways they are interrelated. It's not a linear connection from one to the other, but there's an enmeshment there.
With regard to indigenous women whose sentencing decisions I reviewed in my own research, at the sentencing stage their experiences of victimization might appear before the judge in the form of a pre-sentence report, a Gladue report or counsel submissions. They're not life stories—they're written by institutional actors for institutional purposes—but they detail experiences of victimization that are all interconnected with colonization.
A central part of my own work is to try to define victimization broadly such that it encompasses harms caused by state institutions. For indigenous women, that occurs over time in their own individual lives, as well as collectively and intergenerationally. Victimization manifests along that continuum, including—and this is the part that is really important to me—harms caused by the criminal justice system. Those can be by the experience of being incarcerated or by experiences associated with the criminal justice system. Some women in my research had their children apprehended in ways related to their being criminalized. Others feared losing, or lost, their homes or employment when criminalized. The experience of victimization is at the centre of my concern.
I want to note that in a report that the Department of Justice issued in 2018, they said that indigenous women have lost confidence in system that fails to believe their experiences and that there was insufficient information about the specifically gendered experiences of women in the system, particularly in the context of entrenched oppression for indigenous women. They suggested that the government should require actors in the system, including judges, to consider underlying factors related to victimization and criminalization.
For the indigenous women sentenced within the criminal justice system, there's an interrelationship there with victimization—