Monday, August 11, 2008

Broken Justice in Indian Country

Op-Ed Contributor - Broken Justice in Indian Country - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

ONE in three American Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes, statistics gathered by the United States Department of Justice show. But the odds of the crimes against them ever being prosecuted are low, largely because of the complex jurisdictional rules that operate on Indian lands. Approximately 275 Indian tribes have their own court systems, but federal law forbids them to prosecute non-Indians. Cases involving non-Indian offenders must be referred to federal or state prosecutors, who often lack the time and resources to pursue them.

The situation is unfair to Indian victims of all crimes — burglary, arson, assault, etc. But the problem is greatest in the realm of sexual violence because rapes and other sexual assaults on American Indian women are overwhelmingly interracial. More than 80 percent of Indian victims identify their attacker as non-Indian. (Sexual violence against white and African-American women, in contrast, is primarily intraracial.) And American Indian women who live on tribal lands are more than twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as other women in the United States, Justice Department statistics show.

1 comment:

La Reyna said...

While mainstream media. white liberals and conservatives and brainwashed Native Americans such as David Yeagley and Betty Gross obsess over and over about Black men raping white women in America, Native American women of North America are routinely raped by white and Native American men every single day and there's no outrage by either society and the media.

These women deserve our compassion and sympathy, not scorn and dismissal as usual when it comes to Black and Native American women, two most disenfranchised and powerless group of women in America.

Let' s pray for our Native American sisters.

Steph

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