I just want to thank the committee very much for this opportunity to speak to you today. It's a real honour.
I'm an associate professor in the faculty of law at the University of Calgary. I'm also a former crown prosecutor. I worked for many years in the Northwest Territories, and I dealt with many cases of violence against aboriginal women at that time. That's the experience I bring to these discussions. Because my research focuses on legal responses to violence against aboriginal women, that's going to be the focus of my submission today.
I'll begin by placing the issue of legal responses to violence against aboriginal women in a bit of a factual context. I then have three main submissions to make, which I will illustrate with a concrete example. I'll then conclude by providing some recommendations that are related to my submission.
I know that you've heard many, many statistics as you've been travelling across the country looking at this issue of violence against aboriginal women, and I think it's important, for me anyway, to summarize those into two main points. First of all, violence against aboriginal women is more prevalent than violence against non-aboriginal women and violence against aboriginal men. The other thing is that there are distinctive forms of violence against aboriginal women and distinctive impacts that violence has on aboriginal women, and that sometimes requires distinctive kinds of solutions. For example, aboriginal women are three times more likely to be victims of spousal abuse compared to other victims of spousal abuse.
My own research shows that we often see the involvement of aboriginal women in the criminal and civil justice systems as disproportionate to their numbers in the population. We have about 5% aboriginal people in the population of Alberta. My research on Calgary's specialized domestic violence court shows that about 11% of cases heard by the court involve aboriginal victims. That's two times higher than their overall numbers in our population.
Similarly, my research on provincial family violence legislation shows that a disproportionate number of aboriginal women—22%—are involved as claimants in applications for emergency protection orders. That's more than four times the number of aboriginal women in the population.
At the same time, and you heard this, this morning, from the Edmonton Police Service, there's no requirement on the police to gather information about the ethnicity or race of the people they're seeing. I think that's one example of a very concrete recommendation that this committee could make. It's critically important for us to be able to measure the impact that the justice system and its response has on aboriginal victims of violence. Police need to be gathering that information so we can measure that impact.
Aboriginal women are also at a higher risk of sexual violence by a factor of about seven times and are at a higher risk of homicide by a factor of eight times. It's excellent to have the Statistics Canada reports on family violence that come out every year, but again, those reports don't always break down the level of violence that is being experienced by aboriginal women. So I think another concrete recommendation that this committee could make would be to have Statistics Canada always show in its reports on violence—whether that's family violence or sexual violence—what's the particular impact on aboriginal women that we're seeing.
When we take into account the fact that violence against women, including aboriginal women, is vastly underreported, these numbers we're seeing are really only the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the prevalence of violence against aboriginal women, as I said, it's also important for us to recognize that certain forms of violence may be uniquely experienced by aboriginal women, and these forms of violence are related to ongoing colonization and the oppression of aboriginal women in Canadian society. So I think we can consider the horrible phenomenon of missing and murdered aboriginal women to be a form of violence that is really uniquely experienced by this group of women, and the same is true of the abuse of aboriginal women in residential schools.
That factual context leads me to make three main submissions. First of all, we must acknowledge that aboriginal peoples live under continuing conditions of colonization and oppression in Canada. This has an impact on the levels and kinds of violence that are faced by aboriginal women and on the solutions that are appropriate.
Second, it's critical that the voices of aboriginal women and their representative organizations be given prominence and priority in proposing responses to the violence they face, and I agree with the comments that Jo-Anne Fiske made on that matter earlier this morning. The involvement of aboriginal women is critical, whether we're talking about aboriginal solutions to violence, pursuant to self-government or aboriginal justice kinds of initiatives, or whether we're talking about responses that fall within the realm of Canadian law and policy.
Third, as long as Canadian laws continue to apply to aboriginal peoples, the development and implementation of those laws must always pay special attention to the needs and concerns of aboriginal women and their communities.
Just as a bit of an aside, I want to say that one of my proudest moments as a Canadian citizen in recent years was to watch the apology the federal government gave to survivors of residential schools in the House of Commons and to see Bev Jacobs, who was at the time the president of the Native Women's Association of Canada, stand up and make a response to that apology. That was the first time the Native Women's Association of Canada has ever been given that sort of formal voice as citizens of Canada, and I think that was a real turning point. Aboriginal women were not able to participate in constitutional reform negotiations; they're often still excluded from discussions that take place about the sorts of laws and policies we should have in Canadian society, even though those laws are going to impact them tremendously given the prevalence of violence against them; and it is absolutely critical that aboriginal women and their organizations always have a voice around that table.
Do I still have a bit of time? I'm cut off.