Thank you.
On the numbers, as far as women who are in jail for responding to violence against them, I think the Elizabeth Fry Society nationally used to have those numbers. I don't know how updated they are now, but they used to have those, for sure.
If we're talking federally, then we're missing bodies of accountability. We are missing any kind of accountability in a lot of ways for the RCMP, for example. We need independent police oversight. That's one of the basic things. We need a body that is not police that will investigate violence by police, or misconduct or mishandling of cases, of investigations.
We also need an independent body that enforces the UN recommendations to Canada. We know that the CEDAW committee at the UN has made all kinds of recommendations for the status of aboriginal girls and women in Canada, the violence against aboriginal girls and women, and there is no federal body that is responsible for making those recommendations real.
There needs to be some kind of enforcement, basically, at different levels for the recommendations that, as Marilyn and Tracy have said, have already been made for so many years. There needs to be some kind of body that enforces those recommendations. For sure, there needs to be a department or a section of a department that enforces UN recommendations.
As we have said before, the federal government needs to listen to the Native Women's Association of Canada. And more than listening, they need to take direction from the Native Women's Association of Canada at this point. Also, I know it's provincial, but they need to go to the provincial and territorial aboriginal women's groups.
As far as criminalization, the same is true for aboriginal girls. Aboriginal girls are 40% to 50% of the girls in the prisons in B.C. When we used to do visits to girls in the prison in Burnaby, there would be times when every girl in the room was aboriginal when we were doing outreach. The way we view it, obviously we'd like girls not to be criminalized at all. A lot of the times young women are in jail to protect them from violence. If they're going to the downtown east side, for example, they'll have a condition: “Do not go into the downtown east side, because that's where they use drugs.” The police and the social workers think they're protecting them, but instead they're jailing those girls for their own protection, really, supposedly.
Thank you.