Editorial - Society needs to recognize worth of Aboriginal women

Five hundred. That's the estimated number of Aboriginal women who have gone missing or have been murdered in Canada over the past two decades. Five hundred women-mothers, daughters, sisters-who have died violent deaths, or simply disappeared without a trace, leaving their families and friends to wonder what fate has befallen them.
The fate of at least a few of those women is no longer a mystery, thanks to the RCMP investigation that found traces of their DNA on the Port Coquitlam farm owned by Robert Pickton.
On Dec. 9, Pickton was found guilty of murdering six women and is expected to be tried for the murder of 20 more. But while the Pickton trial and verdict may have provided the families of his victims with a sense that justice has been done; that someone will pay for taking the lives of their loved ones, has it done anything at all to address the societal problems that marked these women as viable targets in the first place?
While working in the sex trade or living on the street increases a woman's risk of being a victim of violence, so, too, does simply being Aboriginal.
When Amnesty International released its Stolen Sisters report in 2003, it quoted statistics indicating that Aboriginal women are at least five times more likely to be victims of violence than are non-Aboriginal women.
The report highlights the tragic stories of Aboriginal women who have died at the hands of men who chose them as victims because of their own racist opinion that the life of an Aboriginal woman is worth less than that of a non-Aboriginal woman, or because of the racist attitudes of society that led them to believe they were more likely to get away with a crime committed against an Aboriginal woman because nobody would really care.
Much work is being done to draw public attention to the high rates of violence perpetrated against Aboriginal women, and to the stories of the many women who have been murdered or who are missing, but most of it's being done at the grassroots level-by the families of the missing or murdered women, and by front-line workers who try to provide supports to Aboriginal women who are living on the streets.
Provincial and national Aboriginal women's organizations are also working to draw attention to the problem, through campaigns such as Sisters in Spirit, but calls for government to do something to change the situation have seen only limited success.
More needs to be done to ensure violent acts perpetrated against Aboriginal women receive the same police attention as cases involving non-Aboriginal people, advocates for Aboriginal women demand. And more needs to be done to address the poverty that forces Aboriginal women into dangerous lifestyles in the first place.
But even these changes won't be enough if there is no change in societal attitudes towards Aboriginal women. The police have to act as quickly on reports of missing Aboriginal women as they do when a non-Aboriginal woman is reported missing. The media has to give the same amount of coverage to all missing person's cases, regardless of whether the person who is missing is Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal. And the people of Canada have to show would-be perpetrators that they can't hurt Aboriginal women with impunity because we do care, and we will demand that justice is done.
Following the conclusion of the Pickton trial, one of the jurors was interviewed by the media, and talked about how sitting and listening to details about the six murdered women at the centre of the trial-about how they lived, and how they died-changed his attitude about them. By the end of the trial, he no longer saw them simply as prostitutes or drug addicts who had chosen a life on the street, but as women, abandoned by society and preyed upon by a man who chose them for exactly that reason. Hopefully that's a shift in perception that society as a whole can experience. And hopefully, for the sake of all Aboriginal women, it's a change that takes place sooner, rather than later.