Those who Take Us Away
Abusive Policing and Failures in Protection of Indigenous Women and Girls in Northern British Columbia, Canada
Description:... On December 5, 2012, a man walking his dog found the murdered body of 16-year-old Summer Star (C.J.) Fowler in a ravine near the British Columbia (BC) town of Kamloops. The Gitanmaax teenager from Hazelton in northern BC, remembered as a sweet girl with a beautiful smile by her family, had been visiting friends a few days previously and was just hours away from taking a bus back home when she disappeared and was ultimately killed in circumstances still under investigation by police. Speaking at a news conference, her father said, "We would just like to stop this violence ... We want some answers and we don't want this case to be another they stick under the rug."C.J. Fowler is just one of several hundred indigenous women and girls who have been murdered or gone missing across Canada over the last several decades. By the time government funding for data collection on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls ended in 2010, the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) had documented 582 such cases nationally. Many happened between the 1960s and the 1990s, but 39 percent occurred after 2000, or about 20 a year. If women and girls in the general Canadian population had gone missing or been murdered at the same rate, NWAC estimates the country would have lost 18,000 Canadian women and girls since the late 1970s. The province of British Columbia has been particularly badly affected by violence against indigenous women and girls and by the failure of Canadian law enforcement authorities to deal with the phenomenon. Cutting through the small communities policed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in northern BC is the Highway of Tears, a 724-kilometer stretch of road which has become infamous for the dozens of women and girls who have gone missing or been murdered in its vicinity.
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