Since Oct. 20, 2011, many Canadians have been captivated by – no, obsessed with the Shafia murder trial in Kingston. Since the four women were found stuffed in an SUV at the bottom of the Rideau Canal and their relatives were found guilty of first-degree murder, the term “honour killing” has exploded into daily discussion and debate.
After the guilty verdicts were read in the Kingston courtroom, Judge Robert Maranger lashed the convicted family, saying that such crimes were not acceptable in a civilized society.
This outrage about culturally motivated violence in Canadian society has caused government officials to announce preventative action.
Although the deaths of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia and Rona Amir Mohammad are certainly tragic and should not be minimized, where is the outrage about the roughly 600 missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada? For a society that is in such an uproar about the violent treatment of women, we seem complacent about the gender violence that is systemic in our own culture.
Following the verdict, Rona Ambrose, federal minister for the Status of Women, announced that the department will fund a program to educate law enforcement officers and social workers about the prevention of honour killings.
It’s ironic that the government has funds to support a program such as this when, in 2010, it cut funding to the highly praised Sisters in Spirit program run by the Native Women’s Association of Canada. The initiative collected decades of unorganized data and created a database of more than 582 missing and murdered aboriginal women, while trying to find solutions to stop the sexualized violence.
The government justified the decision by allocating $10 million to a strategy for dealing with the high numbers of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. However, a significant portion of the funds went to RCMP programs to investigate all missing persons, without a focus on Aboriginal women.
Daleen Kay Bosse, a mother, wife and university student from the Cree nation of Onion Lake in Saskatchewan, was one of the hundreds of women who make up this staggering statistic. In 2004, Daleen went missing from a cultural event and wasn’t seen for four years, until her burned remains were found in an area littered with garbage, automotive parts and old bed springs.
What makes Bosse's story less intriguing than the story of the Shafia victims? What makes “honour killing” crimes more horrific than the widespread sexual violence against Canada’s indigenous population by those within our own ethnicity?
The deaths of the women in the Shafia case are without a doubt, atrocious. But the language used in the past six months points a proverbial finger at other cultures while suggesting that we are a pure and civilized society incapable of brutal and sexist acts of violence.
For our government to suddenly have the funds, and more importantly, the determination to take swift action must be a slap in the face for the families of hundreds of Aboriginal women who are still waiting for their loved ones’ files to reach the top of a pile.