Pizza Diavola

The Pretty Bird Woman House is a women’s shelter on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota. It provides emergency shelter, advocacy support, and educational programs for women on the Standing Rock reservation who have been victims of domestic violence or sexual assault. Due to frequent vandalism of its facilities (and then torching, once the shelter moved out of the vandalized building), the Pretty Bird Woman House was forced to move and is now raising funds to buy a permanent facility.

In April 2007, Amnesty International reported in “The Maze of Injustice: The failure to protect indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA” that

Crime rates on the Reservation often exceed those of its surrounding areas. According to FBI figures, in 2005 South Dakota had the fourth highest rate of “forcible rapes” of women of any US state.

And yet, those figures don’t tell the whole story because

Shocking though these statistics are, it is widely believed that they do not accurately portray the extent of sexual violence against Native American and Alaska Native women.[10]

“Most women who are beaten or raped don’t report to the police. They just shower and go to the clinic [for treatment].”
Native American survivor of sexual violence (identity withheld), February 2006

Amnesty International’s interviews with survivors, activists and support workers across the USA suggest that available statistics greatly underestimate the severity of the problem. In the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, for example, many of the women who agreed to be interviewed could not think of any Native women within their community who had not been subjected to sexual violence.

The situation is exacerbated by the legal difficulties that both tribal authorities and federal authorities face in charging rapists and other criminals for crimes committed in or around reservation land. Cases sent for review by federal enforcement often aren’t prosecuted; “in Spokane, an assistant U.S. attorney … simply declined to prosecute, something that crime data show they do in 65 percent of all reservation cases.” (emphases mine) Amnesty’s report suggests, “It appears that Indigenous women in the USA may be targeted for acts of violence and denied access to justice on the basis of their gender and Indigenous identity.” Furthermore, Native American rape and assault victims are likely to be discriminated against based on the assumption that they in some way deserved what happened:

Of particular concern are reports of discriminatory treatment of survivors who are suspected of drinking alcohol before they were attacked. This is particularly worrying because of the prevalent negative stereotypes which link Indigenous women with excessive drinking. A number of the cases brought to Amnesty International’s attention indicated that police often automatically assume that Indigenous women had been drinking when they were targeted for sexual violence. One Alaska Native survivor of rape told Amnesty International that if a woman is suspected of drinking and reports that she has been the victim of sexual violence, “the police will not respond unless she is either hospitalized or dead.”
- Amnesty International (for more information about the discrimination aspect, search for “Discrimination in federal and state prosecutions” within the Amnesty report)

In short, there’s a cycle going where Native American women are targeted for rape and sexual violence; they’re dismissed as drunks when they report what’s happened to them; their cases aren’t prosecuted; and thus people continue to attack them with impunity, because it’s extremely unlikely that they’ll ever be prosecuted and sentenced.

In light of this situation, the Pretty Bird Woman House provides vital services for women. This year, the three shelter staff have

* Served a total of 614 individuals with education and services.
* Answered 397 crisis calls
* Provided emergency shelter to 188 women and 132 children.
* Helped 23 women obtain restraining orders, 10 get divorces, and 16 get medical assistance
* Provided court advocacy support for 28 women, and
* Conducted community education programs for 360 women.

Donate to the Pretty Bird Woman House so that they can find a permanent facility and continue their amazing work.

For more information:

Pretty Bird Woman House on blogger
U.S. Senate Hearing on the prevalence of violence against Indian women
NPR Article “Rape Cases on Indian Lands Go Uninvestigated”
NPR Article on the Amnesty Report
Standing Rock Reservation

Via Feministe.

[10] For example, the authors of the US Department of Justice study Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Rape Victimization, note that it “under-estimates the true number of rapes committed each year, because [it] excludes rapes of children and adolescents, as well as… anyone living in… households without telephones.”