Conspiracy of Silence

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A conspiracy of silence cloaks the staggering rate of child/sexual abuse in Native communities, says a raining counsellor with St. Albert's Poundmaker Nechi Centre.

Brenda Daily estimated roughly 90 per cent of Native families are both affected by substance abuse and child abuse.

And a Northwest Territories survey done last month found 80 per cent of Indian girls under the aged of eight have been sexually molested and 50 per cent of boys are victims of sexual abuse.

The study also revealed gang rape and organized abuse is also apparent in the North, including one case in which two teenage girls forced younger children into sex games.

Co-sponsored by the Native Women's Association and the Northwest Territories Social Services department, the study is based on interviews with Native elders, community leaders,

health and social service officials and sexual offenders and their victims. It was conducted over four months and covered eight communities in the Western Arctic, including Inuvik, Tuktoyaktuk and Norman Wells.

Alice Hill, executive-director of the Northwest Territories Native Women's Association, was not surprised by the high incidence of sexual abuse in Native communities.

"When I began to find out what had happened to other Native women in the North, I was astonished to learn there is only one Native woman I know who had not been abused at all," said Hill, herself a victim of sexual abuse as a child.

Yet only about 10 per cent of child sexual abuse cases ever get reported.

Sex discussion taboo

In some Native families, discussion of any sexual matters between certain family members is strictly taboo. It would be frowned upon, for instance, to have a son-in-law and mother-in-law engage in a discussion about sexuality.

And Hill pointed out some tribes, such as the Dene, don't even have a word for sex in their language which further buries the problem of sexual abuse within their communities.

Children who grow up in a home with an alcoholic or chemically-dependent parent often live by three rules of denial: "don't talk about it, don't feel the pain, and don't trust anyone to help."

"Because so many Native people have come from backgrounds of abuse, they've lived with these three rules," said Daily, a 40-year-old Metis who describes herself as a recovering alcoholic. "This leads to a cycle of shame and blaming other people for what happens to us."

Denial is reinforced by the Native community, which is reluctant to disclose sexual abuse problems to outsiders: the RCMP, social workers and other non-Native professionals.

In many instances, child sexual abuse cases never make it to court because of the community's refusal to give evidence against one of their member.

"If a child is being sexually abused, probably about 30 people in that community are aware of what's going on but nobody wants to speak out," Hill said.

In one case, a two-year-old girl and her three-year-old sister were repeatedly raped by their grandfather. But the RCMP officer who investigated the abuse "just shrugged his shoulders because he was a friend of the grandfather," Hill said.

Child abuse and incest is often a well-kept "family secret" in the extended Native family, where the pressure for the victim to deny the abuse is greater, Daily explains in the book The

Spirit Weeps.

Many Native people have lived with this secret for three or four generations.

"We can track what has happened when alcohol first came into these Native communities, their first contact with the outside world, 15 or 20 years, and families began to break down," Daily said.

The high incidence of child abuse can be related to other problems that afflict many Native communities such as alcoholism, high unemployment, overcrowded housing. Loss of cultural identity and poor parenting.

Much of the social upheaval Natives are now experiencing can be traced to the introduction of residential schools operation by the Catholic and Anglican churches in the mid-1th century, which separated many Native children from their families at an early age.

The children spent their entire childhood living away from their families, often hundreds of miles from their reserve, and visited home only once or twice a year.

"These schools, which were often located hundreds or thousands of miles from the children's homes, frequently prohibited the use of Native language and tribal customs, required the wearing of uniforms, and enforced rules in an authoritarian manner completely divorced from traditional child-rearing practices," according to one study.

Legacy of rez schools

After World War Two, residential schools were gradually phased out and replaced by the Child Welfare system, which often had the same effect by taking children into care and placing them with non-Native families.

The system reached a peak in the 1960s, when the apprehension rate was so high that some reserves lost nearly an entire generation of children to child welfare authorities, Daily writes.

Recent figures show that Indian children are placed in care at a rate four and one-half times the rate for all Canadian children. In comparison to .96 per cent of Canadian children,

4.6 per cent of all Status Indian children age 19 and under are in care. And 75 percent of Indian children who are adopted are sent to non-Native homes.

Today's adults can be best described as a "lost generation", according to a 1987 child welfare report by the Indian Association of Alberta.

Those who fall in the 22 to 37 age group are the products of parents who learned their parenting roles in the often brutal and militaristic residential schools.

The lost generation

"This generation is lost, for it suffered the residential school inheritance of alcohol and abuse. Moreover, many have been shunted (isolated and alone) from foster home to foster homes," the report states.

Many of that "lost generation" are now parents themselves, with children whose ages range from newborn babies to tenagers.

The IAA study found that as a result of the residential school experience, a tribal view no longer binds the generations. For the first time in their history, Native people are witnessing a profound generation gap.

"The tensions, conflicts and confusion never directly expressed, have spilled over into everyday life creating stark alienation, brutality, substance abuse and suicide," the study found.

"The social situation can be likened to the tornado that struck a small part of Edmonton on July 31, 1987. (The only exception) is that this (social) tornado swept through and devastated an entire generation and the survivors are still experiencing its horror."