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But it’s the violence that three women from the region focused on Thursday.

Helen Knott, a social worker and Site C protest organizer, told of her rape by transient workers.

Judy Maas talked about her sister, Cynthia, who was murdered along the Highway of Tears in 2010.

Connie Greyeyes, a director of the Fort St. John Women’s Resource Society, spoke about her niece, who was doused with gasoline and lit on fire. She named each of her dozen or so other friends and relatives who have been victims of violence.

The report’s authors admitted there are no good statistics to back the anecdotal link drawn between heightened violence and transient resource workers, even though the report references three decades of studies.

But it’s because no detailed data is ever collected on perpetrators. And it’s well documented that most women don’t report sexual violence.

Filling those data gaps is what Amnesty is arguing for, with gender-based analysis and examining the social costs of resource development on a wider scale rather than simply project by project.

Only with that kind of baseline data, it says, can governments protect the human rights of women, indigenous people and others in those communities.

But we know that resource workers are overwhelmingly young, male and transient, and are known to “blow off steam” with often destructive and anti-social behaviour.

Since they have flooded into the region, the per-capita crime rate in Fort St. John has risen to twice that of Vancouver. One in five cases heard at the Fort St. John courthouse are related to domestic violence. Rates of alcohol consumption, alcohol-related deaths and drug offences in the region are now among the highest in B.C.