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.