I guess what I mean by that is you see that coming up in a variety of different ways. The point I was making specifically is that we have legislation right now that allows us to name criminal acts against women as crimes that are committed on the basis of race or aboriginal status or on the basis of sex. Yet sexual violence is not understood in that way.
We tend to limit that provision to gay bashing and other kinds of crimes, for which it's entirely appropriate. But I would really like us to see this problem of violence against aboriginal women and sexual violence against aboriginal women as not just a series of independent discrete acts by bad people who need help to not be bad people or bad men any more. That's one way of looking at the problem, but it doesn't get you very far.
It really has to be understood systemically as an act of sex discrimination. That's what it is. That's how sexual assault functions in society, because it takes away opportunities from women. It makes them poor, it makes them afraid, it makes them disabled. The effect of trauma is often disability. I don't think we often recognize that connection, that even though it's a series of acts perpetrated by individuals, it's collectively a practice of sex discrimination that contributes to women's material inequality in society.