The red dress alert system in British Columbia must be a central feature of a comprehensive provincial service delivery model, which should be led by indigenous women representatives of and should provide services to all first nations, Inuit and Métis, urban and off-reserve, status and non-status indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQTT+ people. I'll get to the “why” shortly.
The province is thinking about two red dress alert pilot projects in B.C. One would be along the Highway of Tears, which runs over 700 kilometres, from Prince Rupert to Prince George. The other pilot would be in an urban area, perhaps Surrey or Vancouver.
What would these pilots look like? They might rely on different tools and they would have to be coordinated by the same central indigenous women-run provincial agency.
For the northern pilot, our primary tool will be billboards. There are signs on first nations land that advertise coffee shops, hotels and such. We could negotiate agreements to electrify those signs to enable red dress alerts, and the first nation could revert to the usual advertising when there was no alert. Where there are no existing billboards, we could negotiate agreements to install them.
There are at least 10 provincial points along the Highway of Tears that would need signs, and we would need them to face both east and west for all traffic in most of these small towns, so we would need a minimum of 20 signs that would have photographs and information about the missing person, a QR code and a central phone number to call. Signs could be programmed for a missing person alert along the entire highway in the direction we think the person was heading or we could focus on a smaller region in which we know the person was very recently seen and might still be.
The electrified signs could be used in combination with apps. Both the urban and rural pilots would utilize newly created apps that people would voluntarily download. One app could be a “find my missing loved one” app that people would use to search for loved ones in a coordinated and organized way. The app could show grids and offer other functions.
We would also need a similar nationwide app that would work for both urban and rural areas. Indigenous people currently use existing social media for searches. We're already connected to each other, but coordination should be centralized and effectively targeted and managed. The apps and signage should also draw in mainstream Canadians.
An urban pilot might rely more on apps and less on billboards.
We need an indigenous-run anonymous app to report sightings or to relay information we might know about a missing person. The City of Vancouver recently moved to provide free Wi-Fi in the Downtown Eastside, where indigenous women continue to be at high risk. The urban indigenous community is small, and we notice each other, but we know there's a lot of human trafficking, which is often gang-run and therefore dangerous. We need to have safe, anonymous reporting of sightings of missing persons so that those reports can be made without fear of retaliation.
Given the size of the province, we need a central system to coordinate with emergency services, police services, victim services, anti-violence services, transition services and safe houses. I have stated the need for the development of a provincial indigenous women-centred organization. I envision an indigenous organization for indigenous people to report missing women, to analyze data from apps and to provide services related to violence. The organization would provide standardized search training and could get funds out to the community within the hour to immediately start a search. It would provide community-based wraparound services for victims who have been found. It would coordinate and disburse provincial and federal anti-violence funds and oversee the ongoing development of indigenous anti-violence capacity.
An indigenous women-centred service model would address the distrust and discomfort indigenous people have with police services, the larger justice system and the existing mainstream anti-violence service bodies. These apps won't work for indigenous people if they are police- or mainstream-run. If appropriately structured, an indigenous women-centred organization would effectively serve all indigenous women and girls and 2SLGBTQTT+ people. It would disburse training and capacity funds and evaluate the change we desire.
Finally an indigenous women-led agency could keep safe the missing women who reported into the agency to state that they were not indeed missing but they simply didn't want to be found for safety purposes.
Thank you.