I'll begin answering that by saying that I'm alive and my sister and my mothers are alive because of other women in our community being really committed to helping women escape violent situations. There's so much that's tied to that in every community.
These systems weren't made to keep women safe. If you think about when we try a case in a public court, you get a public prosecutor who represents the general safety of the public, and that's how they determine what's going to be prosecuted and what is not. Remember that women were not part of the public until 1929. The Criminal Code goes back a lot farther than that. The law has never really been adjusted to include women insofar as prosecutions or the way in which we do that work.
One thing we've been talking a lot about up north is having lawyers for the victims in the same way that a perpetrator gets a free lawyer who is publicly funded. I mean, perpetrators get lawyers twice. They get the public interest lawyer and then they get their defence lawyer. What that tells us, even without saying it, is that women are actually guilty until proven innocent by that process. The burden of proof is on them.
When we think about all of the little ways that we absent women from these systems and absent them having voice, and then tell them to go to a particular service that was actually designed to keep their voice down or to corral them—particularly for indigenous women, to clear them from the land—and that's supposed to be where we go for safety, it doesn't make sense in my brain, my heart or any part of my being. The first place I'm going to go and the first place my mom always took me was auntie's house.