Evidence of meeting #32 for Status of Women in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was community.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
All right. Then we'll move to--
Who would like to go first, Ms. McGee or Ms. Benuen?
Ms. Benuen.
9:55 a.m.
Director of Operations, Sheshatshiu Innu First Nation
I guess I'll go first, but this is the first call in which I will have a chance to get involved in this initiative, and I have no background whatsoever on it. That being said, I do have a lot of issues about violence in the Sheshatshiu Innu community and aboriginal women in particular. I've just been appointed to volunteer for this committee and I'm looking forward to it.
I'll also say that I was asked to be part of this committee only a couple of days ago, and I have no idea what to expect. I would need background information, I guess, with regard to this initiative.
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Ms. Benuen, we would like you to tell us what you know about the level of violence against aboriginal women in your region, the causes of violence against women in your region, and the forms it takes or how it expresses itself. Anything you know about that and can tell us would be very helpful.
9:55 a.m.
Director of Operations, Sheshatshiu Innu First Nation
The community population is about 1,800 and the majority are minors. I guess there's a lot of violence in regard to the women's issues. A lot of women face violence, physical and emotional, from their partners in the community. They sometimes have a hard time going through the court system or going to the police. A lot of the time the police don't come when you want to report violence against you or something like that. That's why the Inuit or aboriginal women in my community are very reluctant to report it.
Also, there are a lot of issues with regard to the minors, the children, and violence. Just this morning I had a call from somebody who works with a couple of children who were involved in sexual abuse. CYFS was involved. Nothing has been done. They came forward and named their perpetrator and to this day nothing has been done for those two kids.
I think it's really important that these issues come forth and that we deal with them in whatever way we can.
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Is there anything further that you want to say about how the system is working now? Is the system serving you?
You have another minute, so perhaps you can elaborate on that. Do you think the system that is working right now helps? Obviously it doesn't. What do you think could be done to make it a little better?
We'll ask you questions later, but I'm just trying to help you use your three minutes.
9:55 a.m.
Director of Operations, Sheshatshiu Innu First Nation
I think that the system has failed aboriginal women in getting the help they need, and not just through the court system. CYFS should be able to help by providing prevention programs, which they don't do. The police force never get there when they're supposed to, when they get called in. So the system has failed aboriginal women by saying that our issues are not as important as somebody else's.
I don't know how to get around that. That's been going on for years.
9:55 a.m.
Health Consultant, Mushuau Innu First Nation
Thank you.
First of all, who am I speaking with? Who is in Ottawa?
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
You're speaking with the Standing Committee on Status of Women. There are 10 members. I'm the chair. The members come from every political party--Bloc Québecois, NDP, Liberal, and the Conservatives, the government party. We're all here--as you heard me ask Ms. Benuen--to listen to issues on the level of violence, what form it takes, and what you think we can do about it.
10 a.m.
Health Consultant, Mushuau Innu First Nation
Okay. Thank you.
My name is Joanne McGee. I work with the Mushuau Innu First Nation in Natuashish, Labrador. Natuashish is a community on the north coast of Labrador. It's geographically isolated, accessible only by plane or ship in the summer months.
As for my role, I don't live in the community. I visit and work there on a travelling basis. My role right now is providing some assistance to the health director, who is Kathleen Benuen. She may have joined this call--I heard a couple of beeps on the line--and if so, she'll speak to things as well.
Certainly from my perspective, I do know that violence against women is an issue in Natuashish. Natuashish is a dry community in that there's an alcohol ban in place. It's in its third year now, but it will be four years in January.
The population is about 850 people, with a little over 50% of them under the age of 24, according to my last assessment of the last census data. It has a high birth rate. There are a number of young women who are having a lot of babies, generally.
Even though there is an alcohol ban in the community, there is still evidence of drinking in the community. Sometimes, as a result of that, women experience violence to themselves or their children. The community is serviced by a safe house, a building that is near the RCMP station. It serves two purposes. First, it's a safe place for youth who may be in unsafe situations, perhaps related mainly to substance abuse, for example. It's meant to be a very temporary solution until their family can sort themselves out, or until they come into the care of child, youth, and family services, or until whatever needs to be put in place happens once the immediate crisis has settled down. The other purpose of the safe house is to provide a safe haven for the women and children who may be fleeing domestic violence situations.
The unfortunate problem we have in Natuashish is that the safe house is underfunded. It's funded jointly by Health Canada and Indian and Northern Affairs. However, the funding level we receive is insufficient to meet the needs of the community.
The mandate of the safe house is to provide 24/7 access to people who need it. With budgetary issues and problems, we've had serious challenges. We've been able to meet that mandate in providing 24-hour access, but we haven't been able to do a lot in terms of outreach and violence prevention types of initiatives. It's mainly been operational requirements of the safe house and trying to meet those needs for women and families.
I personally haven't had a lot of contact. We've recently started working, though, with the Women's Policy Office in Newfoundland and Labrador, and also have begun a working relationship with Status of Women Canada. That's been quite recent. We will be doing that work.
A lot of the work we do around violence prevention, once we can get some funds to support those types of initiatives, involves a group in the community known as the Next Generation Guardians. It is mainly a women's group that provides support to women and young girls in the community. It recently has reached out to men as well, but it's mainly for women and young girls. In terms of promoting, protecting, and preserving the Mushuau Innu culture, it certainly is one of their strengths.
I don't know what else I can say.
10 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you very much, Ms. McGee.
Two other people have just come on.
Can you please identify yourselves?
October 26th, 2010 / 10 a.m.
Michelle Kinney Deputy Minister, Health and Social Development, Nunatsiavut Government
This is Michelle Kinney.
10 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
All right.
Just to recap, you have three minutes. You're speaking to the Standing Committee on the Status of Women and we are looking at the issue of violence against aboriginal women. We would like to ask you a few questions, please.
Can you tell us about the level of violence, the forms of violence, what you think is being done to decrease that violence, and what the root causes are? If you can give us that in about three minutes, specific to your community, there will be a question and answer period later.
Perhaps we'll start with Ms. Kinney.
10:05 a.m.
Deputy Minister, Health and Social Development, Nunatsiavut Government
All right.
I'm Michelle Kinney and I'm the Deputy Minister of Health and Social Development for the Nunatsiavut government. We basically provide services in five Inuit communities in northern Labrador, all of which are isolated, as Joanne said in her previous comments about the Innu.
We have a high level of violence in our community, with violence against women, but violence against children and other groups as well. That takes the form of sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and financial abuse, the whole gamut, I would say.
In three minutes or less it's difficult to give you an accurate picture, but I would say that a lot of it is due to social issues and intergenerational trauma that has been forced on people through relocation, dislocation, and residential schools--all of those pieces. There's a big sense in our communities of loss of culture and, in many cases, loss of language. I believe that in many cases people have not been taught how to form healthy relationships because of the dominance, the lack of decision-making power that individuals have had through relocation, the residential school experiences, and those kinds of things.
We need to do a lot of education and a lot of work about healthy relationships and healthy choices and those kinds of things. Often our programs are in response to incidents that occur. They're after the fact; we're intervening. We do have safe houses in three of our communities--shelters--and they're very valuable resources, there is no doubt about it, but what we're not getting to, I believe, is the heart of the problem, and that's educating: education for women, but education for men as well.
In all of the social interactions that have gone on and the losses that people have faced, men probably have faced even more losses than women. In many ways, women have been able to adapt to the culture shift and have taken on roles in the white culture as nurses, daycare operators, teachers, and those kinds of things. Although they're not the same as their traditional roles, they are more congruent with those. Men have been completely taken away from the things they would normally be doing in hunting and gathering and providing for families. I think that has really never been discussed fully in communities.
We are doing some intervention and we're providing some programming. But the big emphasis, I think, needs to be on learning new life skills, on education, on building healthy relationships, and on helping people to make healthier choices.
10:05 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
For someone who said she didn't know what she was going to say, I think you did very well indeed. Thank you, Ms. Kinney.
Kathleen Benuen.
10:05 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Perhaps you can take three minutes to discuss what we've talked about with regard to violence against aboriginal women.
10:05 a.m.
Health Director, Mushuau Innu First Nation
In our community I find that a lot of women are keeping silent. It's hard to reach them. I see a lot of young girls in relationships at a very young age, and they have bruises on their faces. They're not telling anyone, but you can see that they're in violent relationships.
We have a safe house and a shelter for women. I would like to see more youth hostels. We need to reach the young women, and the women in the community need to come forward to break the silence in the community.
I know there is sexual abuse, but also there's silence. Nobody is speaking out because in a small community everybody knows everybody, and there is a big division in the community. That division also affects the way people keep silent. We need to break that cycle. We need to open the doors for our young women and the women in the community.