Good morning.
Women in the Northwest Territories face extremely high rates of violence in comparison with women in the rest of Canada. The rate of reported sexual assault in the Northwest Territories has been documented at six times the national rate, and shelter use is 4.4 times the rate. In 2008-09, NWT family violence shelters admitted 281 women and 226 children, which was a 25% increase from the previous year.
Intimate partner violence is a major barrier to social development in northern communities and to an improved quality of life for women. Women in most NWT communities face formidable barriers to accessing services and supports to escape from violence. They are actively discouraged from speaking with one another about their situations and from seeking the support of outsiders, such as the settlement officer or the nurse. Women live in fear, and they are essentially voiceless. This committee will not hear from them.
Community pressure serves to keep people quiet about these issues, especially in communities in which violence is condoned as an appropriate way to solve problems and in which sanctions against abusers are low. An NWT survey of public attitudes found that 34.8% of respondents in communities outside the four largest centres agreed with the statement, “physical violence between a couple is a private matter”.
The roots of high violence and the high incidence of social suffering in northern communities, including violence against women and other vulnerable populations, lie in the overall impact of colonization and the impact of the resultant collective and individual trauma that flows from cultural disruption. Generations of separation, institutionalization, dependence, dislocation, and residential school experiences have traumatized people and have replaced the traditional culture of respect with a culture of fear and oppression. In this situation, women, children, and elders are powerless.
In small communities, an emergency RCMP response can range from an hour by road to several days if the community is only accessible by air and the weather is bad. The communities are small, often between 150 and 450 people. Our YWCA travels regularly to these small communities to work with women in the 11 smallest NWT communities, which would be those communities without resident RCMP.
After we have built trust through repeated visits and by listening without judgment, they tell us more about their lives. The north is a hunting culture, and long guns are hunting guns, but they are also used by men to intimidate, subdue, and control their partners. We hear this repeatedly from women.
As a provider of shelter services, the primary facilitator of emergency protection orders, and the organizer of capacity enhancements for the five NWT shelters for women experiencing abuse, we have heard from many women who have experienced abuse. We see older women threatened so badly that they run out of the house without boots and a parka in severe weather. We see young women raped by family members.
This legislation to destroy the long-gun registry removes one of the most effective and tangible means of protecting women in rural and remote communities from the pervasive violence they face.
RCMP repeatedly tell us that they access the long-gun registry information. It allows them to confiscate long guns from the homes where abuse is occurring. Without the registry, they have no means of identifying what guns are owned or of knowing themselves what they may be walking into. But this is only part of the debate.
By not helping those with the authority to intervene to remove weapons used to intimidate women, society is making a choice. We are giving women a strong message.
From my perspective, the most damaging outcome of this legislation is the message to northern women. Passage of Bill C-19 says to women who experience abuse by partners who have long guns, “We are not interested in protecting you”, and worse, it says, “We are not interested in assisting the RCMP to protect you either”.
There is no magic number of visits that we can make to NWT communities to encourage women individually or collectively to try to keep themselves safe when the Government of Canada is clearly saying they do not matter.
Thank you.