I will, Chair.
Good morning. I am the executive director of the Métis Child and Family Services Society in Edmonton. Our agency delivers 10 community programs to the citizens of this city, specifically to the aboriginal community.
Violence against aboriginal women begins at an early age. We deliver 10 programs. I'll speak about five of those programs because they affect violence, certainly family violence and violence against individuals at all levels.
We look after the aboriginal family violence program in Edmonton. Kari is one of the outreach workers. She also works with our SNUG and community outreach program on the street. In that program we have currently more than 430 women on our database, working girls. We try to provide the best support we can to them.
We also work with the protection of sexually exploited children—this program was formerly called protection of children involved in prostitution—and we've been involved in this program since 1998. Unfortunately, many of these girls, who we started working with at ages 14, 15, and 16, are now adults of 24, 25, and 26 who are on the street and can't exit that lifestyle.
Our aboriginal child and family support program provides in-home family services, and we've been doing this for about 25 years.
The other program we deliver is foster care. That's the most troubling one in our community right now because 65% of the children in care in this province are aboriginal.
We also deliver what I call the Choices school program, where we hope to keep our children in school and make life a little easier for them. We have five registered social workers working in five public junior high schools.
Each of our programs deals with the different issues and allows us to work with all groups in the community that experience instances of violence, from the girls on the street to moms and children in the family as well as children and youth in the schools and the community. In the last 21 months we've served more than 700 families that have experienced issues of family violence of one kind or another. We've documented 745 cases of physical abuse, 253 cases of sexual abuse, as well as financial abuse and spiritual abuse. Also, more than 200 of our girls on the streets have experienced physical abuse and beatings in the last two years. In fact, in the last two days—that's why we're running a little bit late—we've been conducting a street outreach program with our partners from the city police, and seven of the girls who were brought in that we had interviewed and tried to provide some support to had reported bad dates where they'd been beaten. The strange part was that only one chose to lay charges and report the incident. And I think it took Kari some time just to convince her that maybe she should report it, because not only was she beaten but she was cut up.
Last year we did a research project funded by Public Safety and interviewed more than 309 working girls. Our findings on that really didn't surprise us. We found that they were all abused at a young age by a family member or friend. Currently, all are abusing drugs. They said that it was these two factors that really allowed them to be coerced or forced or persuaded to do the life on the streets.
We have provided support and help to all of these individuals as best we can over the past 25 years. Unfortunately, it's not getting any better. There's lots of work and lots of support that needs to be done in this field and there's lots of opportunity at the front line. Unfortunately, there are lots of people who want to advocate for our community. They like to meet, they like to talk, they like to plan, but it doesn't appear that they want to get down and actually do the front-line work. I find this frustrating as a member of our community because resources and funding are very limited.
Not a day goes by that we don't have some individual who has been beaten, has had her house ripped up, and has had her possessions taken. Then she has to go back to try to find support or help within the community.
We commend the city police, because they have worked very diligently with all of our units and agencies in the city, but we need other supports. For example, if you're given a move or they help you move and relocate, you can only do that once.
I had a case last week where a women's mate had come in, beaten her up, thrown her out, smashed up her house, and left the water running. We tried to get her relocated, but because she had already had one relocation three years ago they would not consider it again.
Those are some of the issues that affect our community, and they're not getting any better.
We're prepared to answer questions later on.