Native women address staggering violence rates.

[Blue_In_AK]

http://www.adn.com/crime/story/392422.html

By LISA DEMER
[e-mail]

Alaska Native women hurt by physical and sexual violence and advocates for them lobbed question after question at a panel in Anchorage on Wednesday that included some of the state's top law enforcement officials.

<snip>

A separate panel of four women who had been raped or physically abused spoke out about their own gut-wrenching experiences and how they were shaped by what they went through. One who talked was U.S. House candidate Diane Benson.

She told the crowd in the Hilton Anchorage ballroom that she was repeatedly sexually abused in Alaska foster care, that when she was a young teenager and went to the police, a Ketchikan officer not only didn't pursue charges but said he wanted to get in on it, and that she was raped three times by age 20. She didn't even try to report those, she said.

<snip>

Benson, a Democrat who also ran against U.S. Rep. Don Young two years ago, said she's talked publicly about her experiences for a dozen years at victim conferences around the country, though the rapes might be news to people in Alaska. It's not the kind of thing she'd bring up as a campaign strategy, she said. She talks about the worst times of her life to offer hope to other women, she said.

"If I can be a person who can get out there and do what I do, after this violent, neglectful and abusive kind of history and still demand my dignity, find my self-respect, after all of it, so can somebody else," Benson said.

<snip>

The conference, called "Building Momentum," was put on by the Alaska Native Justice Center with funding from the U.S. Justice Department, Office on Violence Against Women.

"We're coming together and we're talking," said Denise Morris, president of the Alaska Native Justice Center.

[ensho]

1. Kicking for justice for women

nt

[Blue_In_AK]

2. Thank you, Ensho

This is a huge issue here:

Victims of abuse

A 2007 study led by the UAA Justice Center found:

• 989 sexual assault or child sex abuse reports to Alaska State Troopers in 2003 and 2004.

• 61 percent of the victims were Alaska Natives, most of them women. Alaska Natives make up about 13 percent of the state's population.

This is just so wrong.

[ensho]

3. very wrong! women's groups need to help clean up these crimes against women

by men in authority. give some men power, they use it on women.

are decent Alaskan men speaking out or are they being cowardly?

racism at work.

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. bump!

[uppityperson]

5. k&r. Often abuse is not noticeable, but is abuse all the same.

[Cerridwen]

6. DESPAIR BEYOND WORDS

From the article:

DESPAIR BEYOND WORDS

These kinds of conferences are not new and yet nothing seems to change, Anna May Ferguson of Togiak said during the rural justice panel.

"You name it. We talk about it, for years and years," she told the members of Alaska Rural Justice and Law Enforcement Commission.

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Here's hoping that this time, talk leads to decisive action.

[Auntie Bush]

7. The abuse on Indian women on Reservations by drunken spouses staggering

and we can do nothing about it. It's criminal! (I'm referring to an Ontario Reservation but I assume the others are just as bad.)

[Cerridwen]

8. Kick. n/t