Thank you very much. My name is Tracy Porteous and I am the executive director of the Ending Violence Association of B.C.
This is a provincial non-profit NGO that works on behalf of 240 anti-violence programs in the province of B.C. What they all have in common is that they respond to sexual and domestic violence, child abuse, and criminal harassment. I have been working in the field of response to violence against women for 31 years.
I'm here not to speak for aboriginal women but more as an ally to them in what I've seen happen to aboriginal women during at least the three decades I've been working in the field. I've had the great privilege of working with many aboriginal women leaders for many years—chiefs; local, provincial, and national leaders and healers; academics; and lawyers—all in the context of ending violence against women, increasing safety, supporting families, and helping people and women move forward with their lives. I've also worked quite a lot with a lot of aboriginal women to look at policies with police and crown counsel and child protection.
There is no doubt that you are aware of the disproportionate levels of violence experienced by aboriginal women in Canada, so I will not go over any of those statistics with you today. You also probably know that in B.C. we have the most murdered and missing aboriginal women of anywhere in Canada, a profoundly troubling reality that we must move forward on.
I'm not going to take the time today to articulate the great volumes of research that have been created about what needs to be done on this subject. In fact I want to caution you about concluding these meetings with recommendations for more studies or more reports. Throughout the first decade of 2000, EVA BC—which is the short form for my organization—working in partnership with the Pacific Association of First Nation's Women, and BC Women's Hospital, held a number of meetings with aboriginal women across the province, all looking at and having discussions about the issue of violence against women, and what aboriginal women felt needed to be done.
We studied the issues very carefully over number of years and we produced two reports, the latter of which is called “Researched To Death”. I think that report alone speaks to what many of our aboriginal sisters believe today: that many governments are willing to fund studies and reports but very few are willing to stand up and fund and support the long-term infrastructural solutions to the problem at hand. In this case it's violence against aboriginal women and girls.
The three organizations concluded, based on the findings of all the reports we could put our hands on, that, alarmingly, aboriginal women experience the highest levels of violence of any women in Canada but to this day, in 2013, very little has been done.
We need programs designed by aboriginal women for aboriginal women, and we believe nothing short of those will do. In fact, across the province and in every territory in Canada right now there are networks of services that are there to respond to sexual and domestic violence. Not all jurisdictions have all the services they need, but all the provinces and territories have these services. They're mostly what I would call mainstream services; that is, services set up by non-aboriginal social services or women's groups.
While many of these services have aboriginal women on staff and many of them reach out to women on reserve, there are many women who live on reserve who can't make it to town or who choose not to go to a mainstream service who would feel more comfortable going to an appropriate culturally based service themselves.
I won't get into the history of colonization as to what might be behind that. There's also a population of aboriginal women who might want the security of going to a mainstream service, who might want to go to town for reasons of confidentiality or because of relations in the local community.
For this reason we believe that of all the things you might consider, there are two that you might consider, and one of them is to make sure the existing anti-violence services across the country have aboriginal women on staff, and that they have appropriate cross-cultural competency training so that they can provide an appropriate respectful response to aboriginal women seeking a service who have been victims of violence.
In addition to adding onto the existing services, we believe there should be a service co-connected to reserves and friendship centres that is run by aboriginal women for aboriginal women in every one of these communities. I believe, after 31 years of working in the field, this is probably one of the most significant things that could be done. This is something that's been done for the last 30 years for non-aboriginal mainstream women: the process of breaking the multi-generational cycle of violence.
Everyone needs help; nobody can do it by themselves. The roots and causes and current attachments and harmful ways that we survivors can think about ourselves all need to be unravelled. One needs a counsellor to help create the new internal foundations and the new internal world frameworks.
This is how self-esteem and empowerment are created. This is how women get to the place where they say, “I've had enough of this violence. I don't deserve what's happening to me. I'm going to make this stop. I'm not going to put up with it any more.”
As for the supports and services that have been put in place by the mainstream, while violence is still at epidemic levels, at least those mainstream women have had those supports, and aboriginal women have made it to those services.
There are many anti-violence workers doing this work. They've existed, as I said, for many years—20, 30, sometimes 35 years for many of them. If you are considering funding aboriginal women's services to exist in a collocated perspective, on reserve or in friendship centres, an enormous sisterhood can be tapped into. We don't need to have services created from scratch. There's a whole 35-year history of the provision of advocacy and empowerment services that anti-violence feminists have created.
Obviously a cultural translation would need to take place. These services aren't for aboriginal women; if you're setting up services by aboriginal women, for aboriginal women, at least some sharing of knowledge could take place. In B.C. alone we have 202 distinct first nations communities with distinct cultural practices that would need to be respected.
As well, aboriginal women, more than other mainstream women, have made it very clear for the last 25 years of us working together in B.C. that any response needs to be more holistic. It can't just be for aboriginal women. It needs to be for men and youth as well.
If we get time a little bit later, I'd like to tell you the story of the development of Canada's first and only sexual assault centre for women, called The Women of Our People, which I had the privilege of helping start on Vancouver Island many years ago.
I think the solutions we need will only come with aboriginal women being at the centre. We need to empower them, I believe, and provide them with the resources to heal their communities.
I won't take up time today talking about the need to change systems, because I'm sure that has formed the basis of a lot of your conversation. I will say, though, that racism is still an active toxin in our society. It remains as a deadly ingredient, responsible for much of the inaction that I think we're all facing right now.
I think we stand on a legacy of violence and racism left by colonization and residential schools, but that's not in the past: those attitudes exist today. I can testify, as a front-line worker and as an advocate for over three decades, that I can still see my first nations sisters being treated differently and being treated with less respect than they deserve.
Each system, therefore, also needs cultural competency training. We must attend to that.
We also need transparency from our systems. We need our systems, including the police and prosecutors, to document who they're providing responses to. I know that at least in the province of B.C. the RCMP does not make a note of who the victims or who the offenders are in terms of race, ethnicity, or cultural heritage. If we don't know who we're providing services to, we don't know who's not getting served.
The attachment and the connection and the release of statistics is something that's all been lost, at least in the province of B.C. I think we need to have that information if we're going to be developing appropriate and useful public policy.
If I have time later and you'd like to ask me about some research we're doing on women who are victims of domestic violence and who are being arrested by the police, I'd be very happy to talk to you about that. It relates to statistics, cultural heritage, and being able to figure out how people are being disproportionately provided with service.
I want to touch on a concept that we believe is possibly a great idea and best practice. The concept we have arrived at is the idea that the demographic of most anti-violence programs across the country is largely non-aboriginal. With regard to these services that I talked about a bit earlier—these mainstream, largely women's, services that are responding to sexual and domestic violence—though many of them have aboriginal women on staff, they need to have more of them on staff.
We would like to suggest that you support the development of a college and/or a university diploma course that would train violence against women workers. George Brown College has something like this in Toronto, but it doesn't exist anywhere else in Canada.
We believe that in a very short time, from the development of this diploma course—