By Canadian Press

Missing, murdered women inquiry calls for justice system to review policies

Jun 1, 2019 | 2:03 PM

OTTAWA — The national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls is calling for considerable legal reforms, including that police services establish standardized protocols to ensure all cases are thoroughly investigated.

It’s also calling for standardized response times to reports of missing Indigenous persons and improved communication between officers and families from the moment they file the report.

The inquiry report — due for public release at a ceremony in Gatineau, Que., on Monday — is the result of a years-long study by commissioners who were asked to probe systemic causes of violence against Indigenous women and girls and make recommendations on resolving them.

It also urges all actors in the justice system, including police services, to build respectful working relationships with Indigenous Peoples by “knowing, understanding, and respecting the people they are serving.”

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Actions should include reviewing and revising all policies, practices, and procedures to ensure service delivery that is culturally appropriate and reflects no bias or racism toward Indigenous Peoples, including victims and survivors of violence, the report adds.

It says that during the course of the inquiry, policing representatives acknowledged the “historic and ongoing harms” that continue to affect First Nations, Metis and Inuit families, as well as the need to make changes to how non-Indigenous and Indigenous police work to protect safety.

The report also concludes that colonial violence, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia against Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people has become embedded into everyday life, resulting in many Indigenous people becoming normalized to violence.

It says Canadian society, on the other hand, shows an “appalling apathy” to addressing the issue, adding that the inquiry “finds that this amounts to genocide.”

The office of Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett declined to comment on the contents of the leaked report until Monday’s ceremony.

“The commission will publicly present its findings and recommendations on June 3rd, and we very much look forward to that,” Bennett’s office said in a statement.

“Out of respect for the independent National Inquiry and the families, we won’t comment on the details of the final report before then.”

Families are finally getting the answers they have been looking for after decades of demanding a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, it added.

In an interview earlier this week, Bennett said the need to ensure families and survivors weren’t let down has always weighed on her. She said the release of the final document will in no way mark the end of the journey.

“You can’t hear the stories, you can’t sit with them in ceremony without just knowing we have to prevent this,” Bennett said. “This is too much hurt and the patterns were there for a long time. We just want to thank the people that started pushing.”

Monday’s formal release of the commission’s findings will indeed be a highly emotional moment for victims’ families, survivors and advocacy organizations, who called for years for an inquiry to be conducted.

In 2005, the Native Women’s Association of Canada created a database tracking cases, and it produced a 2010 report documenting 582 missing and murdered Indigenous women.

In 2014, the RCMP released a national overview and pegged the number at nearly 1,200 between 1980 and 2012.

The inquiry report says that despite best efforts to gather information related to missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, it concludes that “no one knows an exact number.”

“Thousands of women’s deaths or disappearances have likely gone unrecorded over the decades, and many families likely did not feel ready or safe to share with the national inquiry before our timelines required us to close registration,” the report says.

It says, however, that one of the most telling pieces of information is the amount of people who talked about either their own experiences or their loved ones’ publicly for the first time.

“Without a doubt there are many more,” it says.

—Follow @kkirkup on Twitter

Kristy Kirkup, The Canadian Press