Yes, absolutely.
First, I'd like to thank the committee for their important work and for inviting me to attend and present today. Most of the information I'll be presenting today is the result of my work as a research associate at the research centre on violence against women, where I studied for eight years, and research after the Montreal massacre.
Part of my work there involved a variety of research topics and evaluations of programs associated with violence against aboriginal women. I can't get into the specifics, but I headed a three-year study on prostitution across the prairie provinces and talked about experiences and some demographic information, as well as program responses. I'm not currently working in the area of domestic violence, but my current work is on criminal justice programs, on the evaluation of new, innovative court programs and related criminal justice policy pertaining to the case at hand.
I've decided that today, instead of focusing on specific projects I've evaluated, I'll give you a summary of the elements of alternative justice approaches that have proved important or promising and, as well, point out some elements that are not so promising. In addition to this, I'll comment on the difficulties of incorporating these elements and programs in a current crime-control climate that is in many ways antithetical to some of these elements.
The first that I want to comment on is to set a context, and I'm sure it's the context of this committee. It is to recognize that the criminal justice system, in all of its responses, operates as a set of colonizing institutions or a set of institutions against aboriginal people.
I'll quote Ovide Mercredi's opening statement at the aboriginal justice inquiry: “In law, with law, and through law, Canada has imposed a colonial system of government and justice upon our people without due regard to our treaty and Aboriginal rights”. It's within this context that I'd like to continue to talk.
We must consider the use of the Canadian criminal justice system to address the rights of female aboriginal victims of crime as inherently colonial instrumentally, and symbolically limited. This manifests itself in a variety of programs from inadequate police attention to stigma, policies, and laws that push aboriginal women into unsafe spaces, where they are generally vulnerable to being abused. Thus, the task is to find out how these colonial practices manifest themselves, in what spaces, and through which policies, laws, and practices.
In accordance with this, I'd like to break down my very brief five minutes into the following themes: first, causes and responses to crime; and second, spaces of vulnerability specific to aboriginal women.
In terms of causes of and responses to crime, many current criminologists argue that crime, including violence, is caused by or associated with the link in the breakdown of ties in communities between people and their relationships with one another. If this is indeed the case, societies are generally more fragmented, and as people become more detached from communities, from those things that are meaningful in their lives, and from the bonds that hold them together, crime will increase.
This, then, forces us to think about solutions to violence against women in the context of community building: re-establishing ties between individuals that will undoubtedly be more productive and beneficial than those that focus on the offender alone as responsible for his or her actions. Often, traditional criminal justice approaches such as incarceration continue to erode those bonds that give rise to the behaviour in the first place, with this again becoming a circular, vicious cycle.
These solutions b include elements of restorative justice practices, which tend to hold more offenders accountable than, really, the western-based legal system. This would include strengthening community programs, indigenous-based community anti-violence programs, and the use of indigenous cultures to reject violence. These can be plentiful, both at a pre-crime level--or what some call prevention--and a post-crime or responsive level. These are often difficult to establish again in an era and ideology of just deserts and a return to retributive kinds of practices.
The second issue I want to talk about is reducing vulnerability at an institutional level. One of the major findings in the study I did of prostitution across the country was that individuals, in looking for service, tended to avoid those state-sponsored, government-based programs. They tended instead to go to programs that were more insecurely funded but offered much more harm reduction, less fear of coming under the realm of the criminal justice system or the Child Welfare Act, and really, the avoidance of particular kinds of state services.
I'd also like to throw out, maybe as a discussion, how the law itself, particularly in terms of prostitution, tends to put women in vulnerable spaces, where they're much more likely, in order to do their jobs, to avoid law and the arm of police and take their work into very unsafe positions that leave them vulnerable to violent incidents. These laws then increase stigma, increase violence, and decrease the health and safety of women on the street.
I'll leave it there.