Thu May 14, 10:48 AM
By Sue Bailey, The Canadian Press
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/090514/national/missing_women
OTTAWA - The Conservative government is deflecting calls for a public investigation into more than 500 cases of missing or murdered native women.
Liberal MP Anita Neville says her party will push until the government acts.
She says there would be national outrage if hundreds of women from another cultural group were targeted the same way.
A recent report found that 520 native girls and women - most under the age of 30 - have been killed or have vanished since 1970.
Two-thirds of them - 348 women - were murdered, and almost one-quarter are still missing.
The government cites $5 million spent on the Sisters in Spirit research campaign, and says it’s working on a second phase.
Neville says more action is needed.
“Their plight has been ignored long enough - it’s time,” she said Wednesday in the House of Commons.
The Liberals say they’ll write to Justice Minister Rob Nicholson asking for action that goes beyond research.
“It’s time to go beyond the record-keeping and find out why the police are not responding,” Neville said.
“Why are these women missing? Are they women who come from poverty? What are their life circumstances that have put them in this position?”
Media also have a role to play to ensure no missing-person case is swept aside, said Liberal MP and aboriginal affairs critic Todd Russell.
Beverley Jacobs, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, says native girls and women still don’t get the same attention from police or the media when they vanish.
Time and again, families are told by officers that their daughter likely ran away or doesn’t want to be found, she said.
Jacobs recently compared such brush-offs with the frenzy of police and media attention given similarly tragic but non-native cases.
“We’re still dealing with racism, stereotypes, discrimination,” Jacobs said.
The proportion of missing women has held steady at about 25 per cent in the last two years despite regular updates to the Sisters in Spirit database.
“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,” Jacobs reported two weeks ago.
“This demonstrates the ongoing severity and urgency of the issue.”
About half the 520 cases occurred in the last nine years.
Researchers stress they can’t accurately say whether there has been a surge over time because they don’t have enough information on similar cases before 1970.
Details from earlier decades are often sketchy and record-keeping is spotty.
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.
One Comment
My father, James Turner, who was a white male Canadian,disappeared after his brother inherited and sold the house they had both been born in at Long Branch, Etobicoke in the summer of 1974.
In September 2008, after 34 years of searching, I finally located his remains.
My father was a missing by choice case, separated from my mother, and thought to be an alcoholic. I cannot count the number of times police forces refused to file an incident report and said “maybe he doesn’t want to be found”.
Last September, after nine months of fulltime searching in 2008, I finally had the case accepted by the OPP Missing Ppersons and Unidentified Bodies Unit at Orillia, to have my father recognised as formally missing on the CPIC Canadian Police Information Centre database, just after my father’s 81st birthday.
Doors were shut in my face innumerable times due to the privacy legislation, and lack of any formal avenues for family to find family, regardless of skin color.
In September, I drove 10.000 kms and removed soil from the spot where my fathers ashes were dumped by his landlord nine years ago. Without the MPUB unit of the OPP, I could not have cracked the barrier of the privacy legislations to find his remains.
Part of my story is online at Parentcentral.ca, a part of the Toronto Star website, under features. The title is “Loss Doesn’t Go Away”
It is my opinion, that 520 missing or murdered aboriginal women in Canada is merely the tip of a very large iceberg. I am the daughter of the absent father. I have lived a life in Canada both of extreme poverty, and of wealth, and I have found the indifference of the authorities towards my father’s case to be identical. The barriers lie in powerful laws that are at the basis of our society, the Vital Statistics Act, the Municipal Protection of Privacy and Freedom of Information Acts, and others, which need to be changed by law to allow police forces to search legally, and not just by knowing someone in the right government department who is willing to disregard the laws.
Until provisions are made within the privacy laws that safeguard our identities, searching will always be hampered, done only surreptitiously, even by law enforcement officials. Until this access to individuals records is granted to law enforcement agencies, I believe that the necessary mandate of budget and man hours needed to search for missing people will always be severely restricted.
Last winter is the first in 35 years that I have not wondered if my fathers remains did not lie frozen in a snowbank, or in the woods beside a highway, leaves drifting over him, or at the bottom of a Muskoka lake.
I have the soil I brought home in a large bowl with a black spruce seedling in it, a symbol of the Muskoka country my father loved.
For James Turner, always.