Sexual violence scars Native American women

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/03/201334111633172507.html

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Indigenous women in the US experience some of the highest rates of sexual assault in the country. According to the US Department of Justice, nearly half of all Native American women have been raped, beaten, or stalked by an intimate partner; one in three will be raped in their lifetime; and on some reservations, women are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than the national average.

While the numbers are staggering, the reality that advocates such as Brunner see in their work and communities exposes the depth of the crisis.

One of the services that Brunner provides through a group she runs, the Sacred Spirits First Nations Coalition, is outreach to local teenagers. She recalls what one young girl told her about rape: "My mom and I already talked about that. When I'm raped, we won't report it, because we know nothing will happen. We don't want to cause problems for our family."

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"There is a history of racism and oppression for native women which makes predators think somehow we are vulnerable and that we're not protected by the system," said Sarah Deer, a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota and member of the Muscogee Creek Nation. "So you maybe have a hate crime component of this along with a jurisdictional problem."

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