http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/090430/national/missing_women
By Sue Bailey, The Canadian Press
OTTAWA - Police and public safety officials are failing native women who vanish or are murdered at startling rates amid public indifference, says a new report.
The Native Women’s Association of Canada says 520 girls and women have disappeared or been killed since 1970. About half the cases now entered in the group’s Sisters in Spirit database have occurred in the last nine years.
Sixty-seven per cent of the total - 348 women - were murdered and almost one-quarter are still missing. No one has been charged in 150 confirmed homicides.
The other cases involve suspicious death or are still being researched.
Association president Beverley Jacobs says native girls and women still don’t get the same attention from police or the media when they disappear.
Time and again, families are told by police that their daughter likely ran away or just wants some time alone, she said Thursday.
Compare this to the blizzard of police and media attention given similarly tragic but non-native cases.
“We’re still dealing with racism, stereotypes, discrimination,” Jacobs told a sparsely attended news conference on Parliament Hill.
She fought tears as she called on federal public safety officials to come up with national policing strategies to ensure every disappearance is taken seriously.
Young aboriginal women - particularly those under the age of 30 - are especially targeted, she said. Pretty and smiling, they stare out from the pages of the report in which they’re featured, often surrounded by the families who now grieve them.
Many vanished without a trace. Jacobs suspects human trafficking and the international sex slave trade could be a factor. But she stressed that the official research project has neither the means nor the scope to pursue such avenues.
The proportion of missing women has held steady at about 25 per cent in the last two years despite regular updates to the database, says the report.
“This suggests a trend of ongoing disappearances: for every woman found alive and removed from the database (or found deceased and re-coded as a case of murder), the name of another missing woman or girl is added.
“This demonstrates the ongoing severity and urgency of the issue.”
Researchers stress they can’t accurately say whether there has been a surge in recent decades because they don’t have enough information on similar cases before 1970.
Details from earlier decades are often sketchy and record-keeping is spotty.
The federal government committed $5 million over five years for the Sisters in Spirit research project - half of what the association requested to build a database, reach out to native communities on working with police and the media, and to collect vital details from families across Canada.
Most of the 520 cases are based in the West where aboriginal populations are highest: 137 in British Columbia, 85 in Alberta, 71 in Manitoba, 59 in Saskatchewan, 59 in Ontario and 17 in Quebec. The rest are based in the Atlantic provinces and territories or are still being researched.
Funding for Sisters in Spirit is set to run out next year. Jacobs says talks are underway with federal officials to renew the project for a second phase.
Federal justice and public safety officials were not directly involved in the first phase - something she hopes will change.