Yellowknife, NWT – Aboriginal women and girls in Canada are much more prone to violence and violent deaths.
That’s according to Dr. Maryanne Pearce, who created her own database of missing and murdered women in the country as part of her PhD thesis.
Pearce has been collecting data from as far back as 1950, but she says one trend stands out the most.
“Prior to submitting my thesis and since, I’ve done number crunches but every single time I’ve done them the percentages of Aboriginal women in my database remains constant. 22% of the women in my database now are Aboriginal so with 4.3% of the female population in Canada being Aboriginal, you can see that this is grossly disproportionate.”
Pearce spoke to dozens of Yellowknifers Tuesday at the Native Women’s Association of the N.W.T building downtown.
She says Aboriginal families also seem to be more prone to repeated cases of violence.
Pearce considers her work to be a plea for resources and attention that will turn apathy into action founded on solid evidence-based research.
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