Congress Moves to Protect Native Women from Assaults
    By Jim Lobe
    Inter Press Service

    Thursday 26 July 2007

    Washington - Acting in major part on a recent report by Amnesty International and Native American activists, the U.S. Congress is moving to provide additional funding to protect Native American women who suffer disproportionate levels of rape and other sexual abuse.

    The House of Representatives Wednesday approved a bipartisan measure that would provide one million dollars for the creation of a tribal sex offender and protection order registry to identify serial perpetrators of such assaults, most of whom are non-Indian.

    The same measure, which was approved by a 412-18 vote, provides an additional million dollars to conduct a baseline study on sexual violence committed against indigenous women in the U.S. to better identify the extent of abuse and how best to address it. Both appropriations have already been approved by the Senate.

    Amnesty, which published a 113-page report on the problem in April, praised the House action but called for more steps to address the problem.

    "This vote is an important step toward justice for Native American and Alaska Native women" said Larry Cox, the executive director of Amnesty's U.S. section (AIUSA). "But more needs to be done."

    He said Congress should provide more funding to that part of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) that pertains to Native American women, particularly those provisions to ensure that tribal courts and police have the wherewithal to investigate and prosecute cases of abuse, especially in rural areas, and that the Indian Health Service and contract facilities can hire more Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners capable of conducting timely forensic medical examinations after assaults take place.

    The Amnesty report, "Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA," found that indigenous women are at least 2.5 times as likely to be sexually assaulted in their lifetime as other women in the U.S. and that at least one in three indigenous women will be raped or otherwise subject to sexual violence in their lifetime.

    At least 86 percent of reported rapes or other sexual assaults against indigenous women are committed by non-Indian men who are only very rarely prosecuted or punished, according to the report.

    The failure to pursue justice in such cases is due to a number of factors, the report noted, including chronic under-funding of police and health services and a "complex maze of tribal, state and federal jurisdictions that is so confusing that it often allows perpetrators to evade justice entirely..."

    Registered Native Americans, who make up about 1.4 percent of the U.S.' 300 million citizens, are distributed among some 560 tribal governments across the country.

    While these governments are given substantial autonomy over their internal affairs, the federal government has steadily eroded their authority, including their justice systems, particularly in cases involving non-Native individuals or interests.

    In one of the most far-reaching cases, the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that tribal governments cannot prosecute criminal defendants who are non-Indian even if the crime of which they are accused takes place on tribal lands.

    In addition, tribal authorities, many of whose communities suffer the highest poverty rates in the U.S., are chronically under-financed, leading to major gaps in law enforcement and the availability of social and health services compared to non-Native communities.

    The report, which was based on Justice Department data and research in three states with proportionately large Native American populations - Alaska, South Dakota, and Oklahoma - found indigenous girls and women suffered most from these deficiencies.

    "American Indian and Alaska Native women are living in a virtual war zone, where rape, abuse and murder are commonplace and sexual predators prey with impunity," Sarah Deer, an attorney at the California-based Tribal Law and Policy Institute, told IPS in April.

    "In many tribal communities, rape and molestation are so common that young women fully expect that they will be victims of sexual violence at some point," she noted, adding that the weakening of tribal justice systems by the federal government has made it far more difficult for victims of sexual violence to gain redress.

    Indeed, federal and tribal statistics may understate the degree of violence suffered by Native American women, according to the report, which noted that fear of retaliation and the lack of confidence that the authorities will take allegations of assault seriously tend to reduce reporting of sexual assault throughout the United States, as well as in Native American communities.

    One support worker in Oklahoma, for example, told AI that only three of her 77 active cases of sexual and domestic violence had been reported to the police.

    And many women interviewed on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota said they could not think of a single Native American woman within the community who had not been subjected to sexual violence at some point in their lives, and that many had suffered several assaults, by different perpetrators.

    Native American women were victims in nearly 80 percent of confirmed cases of rape and murder in Alaska over the last 15 years, according to a medical professional responsible for post-mortem examinations of such cases in the state who was interviewed by AI. Native Americans make up only 16 percent of Alaska's total population of about 675,000.

    Jurisdictional issues have often been a major obstacle to successful prosecution of sexual assaults, particularly in states such as Oklahoma where land owned by nearly 40 different tribes adjoin each other and are often intersected by state land in a "checkerboard" pattern.

    "Being an Indian woman rape victim in the state of Oklahoma usually means that law enforcement officers spend as much time trying to determine the appropriate responding authority as they do in protecting you from the rapist," Renee Brewer, family violence co-ordinator with the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, told Amnesty. Cases involving multiple jurisdictions often result in no prosecution at all.

    While jurisdictional problems are serious, tribal authorities also often lack the means to respond in a timely way, let alone investigate and prosecute, cases in the rural areas that make up many U.S. Indian reservations.

    In South Dakota's Standing Rock Reservation, an area of almost one million hectares (2.3 million acres), tribal police have at most three patrol officers on duty during the day. Amnesty found that women who report sexual violence there often have to wait for hours, even days, before receiving a response from the police department, if they receive any at all.

    In Alaska, the situation for Native American women in rural districts, a third of which have no police presence at all, is even more dramatic.

    In addition to under-funding Native law enforcement agencies, the federal government has also denied adequate resources to the Indian Health Service, according to Amnesty, which found that even in cases where health facilities were relatively close and accessible, they often lacked qualified staff or even inexpensive rape kits that would be helpful to any eventual prosecution.

    The fact that non-Native perpetrators cannot be tried in tribal courts has actually drawn sexual predators to tribal areas to assault women, because they know that federal prosecutions are rare in those areas, according to Deer.