Stephen Harper said WHAT about crime and aboriginal women?
Don’t think of Canada’s growing list of murdered and missing indigenous women as any sort of “sociological phenomenon,” Stephen Harper says. In Harper’s black and white world, the murder of Tina Fontaine in Winnipeg, an aboriginal teenager who had run away from her foster home, is simply a crime for law enforcement to solve. The problem? […]
Don’t think of Canada’s growing list of murdered and missing indigenous women as any sort of “sociological phenomenon,” Stephen Harper says.
In Harper’s black and white world, the murder of Tina Fontaine in Winnipeg, an aboriginal teenager who had run away from her foster home, is simply a crime for law enforcement to solve.
The problem? Even the RCMP situates the staggering number of vulnerable aboriginal women who are victims of violence (exceeding 1,000 since 1980) in a larger context of inequality and injustice.
In raw numbers, that translates into a rate of homicide per 100,000 of 4.45 for aboriginal women compared to 0.90 for non-aboriginal women. And aboriginal women account for 4.3% of the overall Canadian female population, but account for 11.3% of the cases of missing women and represent 16% of female homicides.
Here are 10 tweets explaining how absurd Harper’s crime comment is — all in under 140 characters.
Photo: Joshuatree. Used under a Creative Commons BY-2.0 licence.
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