This chapter examines how one particular group of people within Canada, indigenous women, experiences both a higher rate of victimization and a lower rate of case clearance. Indigenous women in Canada are three times more likely to be killed by a stranger than non-Aboriginal women, and as of 2010, clearance rates for cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous women are consistently lower across Canada. Despite these statistics, other measures show that Indigenous women show similar satisfaction with their personal safety from crime as non-Aboriginal women as well as other measures indicating a similar confidence in the criminal justice system as non-Indigenous women. In this chapter, it is argued that the dissonance between certain measures is indicative of the settler-colonial heritage that informs both the perception of violence against indigenous women in Canada, as well as the phenomenon of violence against indigenous women themselves.
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While Canada in comparison to other countries has a reasonably low homicide rate (1.8 per 100,000 people) (Statistics Canada, 2017), Canada has a fairly high rate of sexual assaults (65.5 per 100,000), though these recent statistics are attributed to higher reporting levels (Rotenberg & Cotter, 2018). Comparing statistics to other countries, however, is not the focus of this examination. This analysis is instead concerned with the incidence of violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada, in comparison to non-Indigenous women. Statistics Canada, do specifically target Indigenous people with several measures. For example, in 2018 “more than one in five victims of homicide were Indigenous people” (Statistics Canada, 2019), with the homicide rate for indigenous people at 7.31 per 100,000 people versus the overall rate of 1.44 for non-Indigenous people (Statistics Canada, 2019). Of these victims 69% were male and 31% were female. Specifically in relation to Indigenous women and girls, in a report released in 2011, while it was found that Indigenous women were more than 3 times more likely to report being victims of crime than non-Indigenous women (Brennan, 2011), the report however cited that collecting the statistics on Indigenous victimization was difficult as the “Aboriginal identity of many homicide victims [was] unknown” (Brennan, 2011, p. 9). In addition, this report identified that 76% of Indigenous women did not report incidents of non-spousal violence to the police.