Thank you. It's a great pleasure being here, and my colleague Katharine Irngaut is here with me as well. She manages our violence and abuse prevention department.
It's wonderful to see friends here. Mr. Saganash, it's a great pleasure to have you here as the representative for Nunavik. You'll know exactly what we're talking about. Unnusakkut.
We bring greetings, first of all, from our president, Rebecca Kudloo. She lives in Baker Lake, and she's on her way to Norway now for a preparatory meeting for the UN World Conference on Indigenous Peoples. We bring her greetings, and she is very grateful to see what we hope will be some substantive work on the issue.
Pauktuutit has been the national representative organization of Inuit women for nearly 30 years. This is our 30th anniversary year. Since that time, violence against women, including child sexual abuse, has been and continues to be a priority.
Over the last couple of years, with more attention being paid to the issue in Canada, our board of directors has had very specific and detailed discussions about potential national initiatives. We want to tell you first about the different circumstances and priorities of Inuit women. Their culture, their language, and the geography of their communities are unique. They live largely in 53 communities across the Arctic. They're all isolated. They all fly in and fly out. There's very limited infrastructure, as we've heard someone mention before. There may or may not be a social worker, any sort of a health intervention worker, and more than 70% of these communities do not have a safe shelter for women and children. In Nunavik, for example, there are 14 northern villages, as they are called in Nunavik. There are three shelters, and they're not enough.
We've heard stories of women who have died because their requests to a social worker to be taken out of their community was denied. We've heard stories of women and children who have died as a direct result of overcrowding of shelters. This is in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut.
Within this context, initially our board of directors discussed a potential national task force in the context of their lives. At that point, they felt they did not want to support a national initiative but more specifically the human and financial resources that would be required when there are such critical emergency situations in the communities. However, they welcomed the creation of this committee and hope to be a key ally and key informant for you.
As was mentioned before, many socio-economic issues have to be addressed: overcrowded and inadequate housing, low educational attainment, poverty, food insecurity, high rates of unemployment, and very high rates of child sexual abuse.
One of Pauktuutit's priorities is to address the fact that violence happens along a continuum, across the lifespan. We would never diminish the significant work done by NWAC, but Inuit women's priorities are very different from the Highway of Tears, the tragedy in Vancouver. So this is extremely important to us. Within your work, the scope, and the mandate of what you're taking on, we request that our priorities be considered separately and specifically, and that any recommendations also be separate and specific.
I appreciate that we're short of time. I'm going to let Kat talk about a couple of new and emerging issues. We didn't come prepared with a formal presentation; we didn't come with pages of statistics, but they are certainly readily available. Again, another study was released only yesterday that documented the link between the childhood experiences of people who committed suicide and childhood sexual abuse. We need more evidence, but a lot is available.
I'll turn it over to Kat, and then we would welcome your questions.
Thank you.