I will take the first question, which dealt with the Aboriginal Cultural Awareness Program provided through the correctional system.
The reality in Canada is this. Provincial prisons do not have adequate budgets. They receive less money than facilities operated by the Correctional Service of Canada. As a result, the culture awareness programs for Aboriginals are only offered in federal penitentiaries in Canada, in the five administrative regions.
But again, as I was saying earlier, inmates need to be classified based on their needs, and not on their risk level. That is the change we have noticed since 1996. Previously, they were looking at their needs, but now they are assessing the risk level. When you start thinking about that, the question that comes to mind is: what risks do Aboriginal offenders pose to others? Not much. They are more of a danger to themselves than they are to others.
Your second question dealt with what men want. I would like to come back to something I consider to be very important, and that is the compartmentalization of responses with respect to violence against Aboriginal women. I should really be talking about Aboriginal violence. Our system is built around interventions aimed at women. When a violent incident occurs, police officers arrive on the scene, handcuff the man and give the woman a business card telling her where to get services for victims. People are boxed into the status they have been assigned. The man is necessarily the aggressor and the woman is necessarily the victim.
For 10 years now, I have been hearing Aboriginal women say that they want to work with their men. The traditional feminist approaches don't jibe with what Aboriginal women are asking for. They don't necessarily want to leave their family and their husband. They want to work through the problem of violence with them, in healing circles, because the violence affects the entire family. You don't solve the problem by taking the woman away from her family and sending her out of the community to live in a safe house, whether it is culturally sensitive or not. Whether or not the safe house or the prison has dream catchers, as opposed to bars on the windows, the fact remains that it is a prison that restricts human freedom.
That is something that has to be considered. We have to stop putting people in nice neat boxes, as Anne so eloquently explained. It is critical that Aboriginal men be able to start a dialogue with Aboriginal women so that they can understand each other better. And I am about to submit an application for funding to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I want to explore the experience and the way that Aboriginal men build the violence they're involved in.
I want to give these men a voice, and get their perspective.