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“It’s the case that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of severe violence against aboriginal and other women are male. But that has often occluded our understanding of the way that males can be even more vulnerable to violence from other males than women are,” says Jones, who advises the UN on anti-genocide programs.

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The call for adding indigenous men and boys in the national inquiry is supported by many, including Janine Cunningham, who serves on a national indigenous committee of the Canadian Association of Social Workers and belongs to B.C.’s Tsilhqot’in First Nation.

The statistics are disturbing. UBC Okanagan researcher Penny Handley has discovered that 2,500 aboriginals were murdered between 1982 and 2011 (out of a total of 15,000 Canadian murders).

A further 105 indigenous females have, in that period, been reported missing. Yet Jones, who collaborates with Handley on research, wonders why no data has been collected on missing indigenous males.

Of all of Canada’s aboriginal murder victims, Handley found 71 per cent were men or boys.

At the other end of the grim homicide equation, however, former aboriginal affairs minister Bernard Valcourt and the RCMP have acknowledged seven of 10 killers of aboriginal women are aboriginal males. Only eight per cent of the women’s killers were strangers.