Blog: Article on sexual assault at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation

Wednesday, January 26, 2011  

"Will the Obama administration's efforts in Indian Country help end a decades-long epidemic of sexual violence and abuse against women on reservations? One can only hope that the momentum spurred by the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 and the work of a new Department of Justice task force to streamline prosecution of violent crimes against women on the rez will result in systemic reform. That's what it will take for victims have the confidence to bring charges and know that they won't be brushed off, blamed, or retaliated against.

The current problems with violent crime are meticulously reported in a damning article in this month's Harper's Magazine. (A subscription is required to read online; the piece alone is worth the magazine's $6.95 cover price.) In the story, writer Kathie Dobie outlines how the failures of the tribal and federal criminal justice systems have led to high crime rates and few convictions for violent offenders on reservations. Dobie begins by documenting the difficulties she experienced in even reporting on the subject, Obama's commitment to transparency and open government notwithstanding:

"My second day on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas, an official from the Bureau of Indian affairs sent a memo to all its law-enforcement employees forbidding them to talk to me."

The piece goes on to catalog the impediments to justice for women assaulted on the rez. First there's the federal government's failure to prosecute all but the most heinous cases -- a 2007 Denver Post series reported that, between 1997 and 2006, federal prosecutors declined two-thirds of the cases brought to them by the BIA and FBI. There are also jurisdictional challenges: tribal police can prosecute tribal members, but the feds have to prosecute non-tribal members even if the crime is committed in Indian Country. And then there's what Dobie refers to as the small-town nature and culture of reservations, where an assaulted woman may be perceived as getting what she deserved, and petty biases may determine whether or not a crime is taken seriously -- even by a police officer or hospital employee, as the story documents."

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The GOAT Blog: Sexual assault on the rez (High Country News 1/26)