Good evening. My name is Meghan Rhoad. I'm a women's rights researcher with Human Rights Watch. I'm here with Liesl Gerntholtz, who is the executive director of the women's rights division at Human Rights Watch. Our colleague, Samer Muscati, is also present today.
We would like to express our gratitude to the committee for extending this invitation to speak on this very important subject. We would also like to recognize the traditional Algonquin territory in which we are present.
Human Rights Watch is an international organization that documents human rights abuses around the world and advocates for policy changes to ensure respect for human rights. Our involvement in the issue of violence against indigenous women and girls in Canada began when Justice for Girls, a Vancouver-based organization that advocates for the rights of girls in British Columbia, submitted a briefing paper to Human Rights Watch in November 2011. The paper described human rights violations against indigenous teens in northern B.C. and requested that Human Rights Watch investigate.
In the summer of 2012, Samer Muscati and I proceeded to conduct such an investigation, with facilitation by Justice for Girls, and indigenous women advocates and experts, Mavis Erickson and Sharon McIvor. We conducted five weeks of field research in northern B.C. examining how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police treated indigenous women and girls both as victims of crime and as suspects. We travelled Highway 16, often referred to as the Highway of Tears, where at least 18 and possibly more than 40 women and girls have gone missing or have been murdered over the last several decades. From Prince George to Prince Rupert and as far south as Williams Lake we visited communities devastated by loss, where the absence of answers in many cases has exacerbated decades of tension with the police.
In total, we conducted 87 interviews. We talked with indigenous women leaders, tribal chiefs, domestic violence counsellors, homeless shelter staff, youth outreach workers, court workers, and on an informal basis, current and former police officers. Most importantly, we spoke with 50 indigenous women and girls themselves about their experience with the police.
On the basis of that research and our analysis of policy information provided by the RCMP, Human Rights Watch published a report entitled, “Those Who Take Us Away: Abusive Policing and Failures in Protection of Indigenous Women and Girls in Northern British Columbia, Canada”, which I believe has been distributed to you tonight. The report, published almost a year ago, documents a deeply fractured relationship between the RCMP and indigenous women and girls in northern B.C. It documents not only how indigenous women and girls are under-protected by the police, but also how some have experienced outright police abuse.
According to our interviews in B.C., women who call the police for help following domestic violence or sexual assault may find themselves blamed for the abuse, are at times shamed for alcohol or substance use, and risk arrest for actions taken in self-defence. Likewise, despite policies requiring active investigation of all missing persons reports, some family members and service providers who had made calls to police with such reports said the police failed to investigate promptly.
Further, Human Rights Watch documented abusive policing of indigenous women and girls: young girls pepper-sprayed and tasered; a 12-year-old girl attacked by a police dog; a 17-year-old punched repeatedly by an officer who had been called to help her; women strip-searched by male officers; and physical and sexual assault of women in custody.
For many of the indigenous women and girls we interviewed, the abuses and other indignities visited on them by the police had come to define their relationship with law enforcement. At times the physical abuse was accompanied by verbal, racist, or sexist abuse. Concerns about police harassment led some women, including respected community leaders, to limit their time in public where they might come into contact with officers.
The situations documented in our research, such as a girl restrained with handcuffs tight enough to break her skin, detainees who had food thrown at them in their cells, and a detainee whose need for medical treatment was ignored, raise serious concerns about tactics used in policing of indigenous communities in B.C., and about the police officers' regard for the well-being and dignity of indigenous women and girls.
We do not contend that the information we gathered proves a pattern of routine systematic abuse; in fact, we recognize the honourable service of many police officers who work hard to protect communities in the north. However, when incidents of abuse take place in the context of an already tense relationship with the police, they have a particularly harmful, negative impact. They leave women and girls feeling that they have nowhere safe to turn.
Not surprisingly, indigenous women and girls report having little faith that police officers, who are responsible for mistreatment and abuse, can then offer them protection when they face violence in the wider community.
I will now turn this over to my colleague, Liesl Gerntholtz.