I'm not a criminologist, so I have to rely on the work of others in that regard. There's certainly lots of research, and Bev has mentioned some of the studies, to indicate that women who are serving federal sentences for crimes of violence almost exclusively, almost 100%, have themselves been victims of violence in the past. There's also some writing on the relationship between the sentencing of women and their violent history.
I mean, to connect that to the mandatory minimum sentence and the gender-based aspect of that.... The real concern with mandatory minimum sentences is that of course the only way to get out from under them, at least in jurisdictions where they're used a lot, is to finger somebody else, right? So eventually people go down the chain, trading off information about something else, and it's the people at the bottom who have no one else left to finger.
I can say with some confidence that aboriginal women are less likely to be at the top of that chain than they are to be at the bottom.