Again, this is a big, important question. Obviously, and I'll say this for the record and you all know this, these are issues across the board in socio-economically disadvantaged communities and in wealthy communities. It cuts across the board. They are in first nations communities obviously but they are also in wealthy, white communities.
For example, on university campuses, there is the rape pandemic, if you want to call it that, or the serious problem of rape and sexual violence. A lot of this is happening at elite universities with young students who are very well-to-do and still acting in these abusive ways.
A gentleman in the United States whose name is Oliver Williams is a professor at the University of Minnesota. He is an African-American and one of the founders of The Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community. He has been saying for years that we can't have this one-size-fits-all approach to the prevention of domestic and sexual violence because some approaches that might work in some communities don't work as effectively in others.
For example, if law enforcement is the single focus of the approach or the most important or powerful focus of the approach then poor and impoverished communities are going to face disproportionately the brunt of law enforcement's power. We know that people in wealthier communities have ways of avoiding detection by government authorities. There are all kinds of class-based reasons why there's more surveillance, if you will, in poor communities. So just saying law enforcement is the approach means that a lot of poor communities will be alienated from that strategy because for example a lot of poor women will be concerned that their husband will lose his job or her economic means will be threatened if he's in jail and she just wants the violence to stop and she doesn't want him to go to jail.
We have to be culturally, ethnically, and socio-economically sophisticated in how we apply some of these concepts in different communities and that includes poor communities with poor women.