Are MLAs victimizing the victims?

In April 1997, a distraught man wielding a knife made his way past the front door of the Qimaavik transition home in Iqaluit.

Once inside, he found his estranged partner and her young child. He took them hostage, holding a knife to the woman’s throat for many hours as police surrounded the building to wait him out.

After the man gave himself up early the next morning, more than 20 women and children seeking refuge at the home returned, but not until after a defenceless woman and an innocent child had been traumatized — within the only place in Nunavut where their safety is supposed to be guaranteed.

For the traditionalist MLAs who complained in the legislative assembly last week about how male abusers are often prevented from communicating with spouses who take refuge inside women’s shelters, this incident should help to answer their questions.

The safety and security of clients must be the first priority of those who run the Qimaavik home and others like it. Their next highest priority should be to help their battered, traumatized clients find the strength to rebuild their lives.

Since 1986, Qimaavik — known in its early years as “Nutaraq’s Place” — has served as the last and often only hope for thousands of Baffin women and children victimized by violence. Between April 1, 1998, and March 31, 1999, there were 4,460 admissions to the Qimaavik women’s shelter in Iqaluit. The following year, that number rose to 5,583.

The Qimaavik transition home — the only one of its kind in Nunavut — was started by Inuit and continues to be run by a majority of Inuit. Its board, the Agvik Society, was born after a historic meeting held in Iqaluit in December 1985, attended by dozens of Inuit men and women from every community in the Baffin region.

Although the government of Nunavut provides most of its funding, the Agvik Society runs Qimaavik, not the government. That means its hard-working employees don’t get the generous salaries and benefits paid to unionized government workers.

The Agvik Society and Qimaavik have always respected Inuit culture, and did so long before the territorial government’s promotion of “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit” as a political construct.

Sadly, this widely known and easy-to-find information appears to be beyond the grasp of some esteemed Nunavut legislators. The traditionalist members who ganged up on Health Minister Ed Picco last week displayed an ignorance that defies understanding.

“Sometimes when the women are sent out to the shelters, whether to Iqaluit or to another community, and if they are here in Iqaluit, many end up drinking and some end up having extramarital affairs,” Tunnuniq MLA Jobie Nutaraq declared.

Wait a minute. Isn’t that what many MLAs are renowned for when they end up in Iqaluit? Through his words, Nutaraq is telling us, in effect, that two-faced hypocrisy is perfectly consistent with his version of “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit.”

Nutaraq went on to complain about the suffering of children left behind by mothers who seek refuge at Qimaavik. He made no reference, however, to the suffering children who have to hide inside closets and utility rooms while daddy smashes their mother’s face in. The suffering of female victims, however, appears to be irrelevant to Nutaraq. Not once did he acknowledge that their abusers are guilty of serious crimes.

Then Rankin Inlet South MLA Manitok Thompson piped up with a story about how she tried to “contact” a women’s shelter on behalf of an aggrieved male constituent. How reassuring for Nunavut’s many victims of violence. Now they know even their MLAs can be counted upon to side with their assailants.

Another traditionalist MLA, David Iqaqrialu of Uqqummiut, complained that Picco’s answers just didn’t have enough IQ in ‘em.

“The government members are making responses without any regard to Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. It is something that I do not tolerate,” he said on Feb. 21.

If Iqaqrialu wants respect from mature adults, however, perhaps he could say something like this the next time he gets up to speak: “Too many innocent people in Nunavut are suffering from violence and abuse. It is something that I do not tolerate.”

Since the creation of Nunavut, many Nunavummiut have basked in a nostalgic haze of inward-looking cultural traditionalism, ignoring the fact that governments at all levels have been incorporating Inuit culture into their policies for nearly 40 years — in social policy, education, wildlife management, and the justice system.

Elders committees to deal with domestic violence? That’s an old idea that’s already been tried, sometimes with disastrous results for abuse victims.

In 1985, in Arctic Bay, a territorial court judge, upon the urging of a well-meaning elders’ committee, allowed a convicted rapist to serve a short sentence in the community instead of the four-year stretch in federal penitentiary that his offence would normally have warranted. As Nunatsiaq News reported last summer, the victim in that case, who was a teenager at the time, is still getting counselling for the trauma that she endured. No one paid attention to her needs.

Before playing with potentially dangerous community-based experiments in which powerless crime victims have their fates decided by the arbitrary whims of powerful community leaders, Nunavut legislators must first face the ugly truth.

Nunavut has the highest per capita rate of violent crime in Canada, including homicides. That doesn’t mean the streets of Nunavut’s communities are dangerous. Most of the time they’re not. It does mean, however, that for the weak and the vulnerable, it’s Nunavut’s homes that are dangerous. That’s where the violence takes place, at home, behind closed doors.

It’s mostly males who are responsible for major crimes of violence — 676 in 2000, compared with only 484 in 1999. As for females, 119 were charged with major crimes of violence in 1999, compared with 98 in 2000.

This is occurring at a time when the overall crime rate in Nunavut is rising, even though crime is decreasing everywhere else in the country. In 2000, 6,130 Nunavummiut were charged with criminal offences, compared with only 5,085 in 1999. Over the years, a long list of Nunavut leaders, including MLAs, mayors and elected Inuit association officials, have done their best to contribute to these appalling statistics.

But some leaders, such as Quttiktuq MLA Rebekah Williams, are obviously dedicated to higher values.

“As long as there is violence in the home, we must support shelters that provide safety,” she said in a member’s statement this week.

There are those who seem to believe that the creation of Nunavut should bring about a restoration of absolute power to traditional male leaders.

But Nunavut was created to bring power to all Nunavummiut, male and female, young and old. If that doesn’t happen, then the creation of Nunavut will have been a waste of time.

JB