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Plunk those “gaps” down in front of any criminologist and without knowing a single other thing about the population, he would likely paint you a picture as grim as the one we face in Canada with respect to the violence afflicting too many aboriginal Canadians.

It is not that there are no female-specific issues to be discussed. In a recent analysis of self-reported victims of crime in the General Social Survey, Samuel Perreault of the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics concluded that “aboriginal identity did not stand out as a characteristic linked to the risk of victimization” on its own. Rather, the greater presence of known risk factors in that population explained it. It did not, however, explain aboriginal women’s astronomically higher rate of reported sexual assaults.

Still, closing those gaps has always been the meat of the task. And as important as it clearly is for this inquiry’s proponents to address the roles of colonialism and racism in creating those gaps, the most important solutions to them will be far more prosaic. Money, for one, and lots of it.

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As a first matter of business, then, this inquiry ought to commission a dispassionate, comprehensive statistical portrait of the problems in play, both widely and narrowly drawn — something that has been woefully absent thus far in the discussion. We have had an RCMP report into missing and murdered aboriginal women that said nothing about men. We have had data delivered in private to Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt suggesting that the majority of victims knew their assailants, which should not have been surprising — it’s true of violent crime victims across the board. Yet when Valcourt said it out loud, he was accused of “victim blaming.” More recently, we had a Toronto Staranalysis that suggested fewer victims than the RCMP suggested had known their assailants in any significant way … but as the newspaper didn’t run the same analysis on non-aboriginal victims, it was unclear what to make of it.

This whole process often seems to be more about what people want to say and hear, than what they need to say and hear in order to address the problem at hand. It has been a mess, and a poor basis on which to begin this inquiry. Whatever you think of its focus, with a massive follow-up commitment, there is no reason this inquiry can’t change many lives for the better.

National Post

cselley@nationalpost.com

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