the Missing women

Domestic abuse is not a rare occurrence in the world, be it rich or poor, educated or drop outs, hetero or gay, with or without substance abuse history, and in all races and cultures.

We doctors often see cases of abuse, especially in the Emergency rooms, but more often we find it is the cause of our (usually female) patient's symptoms.

Often the patients never mention the abuse, but present with vague symptoms, (aka "somatization") and some end up seeking opioid drugs or tranquilizers to numb their depression (these make things worse and can cause addiction).

Many of these patients have had bad things happen to them, and often counseling and anti depressants help, but not if the cause is chronic abuse and the patient refuses to leave her "loving" spouse.

And sometimes the cause of the depression is complicated from family and societal problems that we docs can't really treat.

My last job in the US was working in the IHS, and we saw a lot of these cases there too, often from alcohol/drug abuse, broken families, etc. but with the complication of culture stresses: living in a minority culture that is despised by the mainstream culture.

So I was happy to find out that the Feds under Attorney General Barr are now funding an initiative to fight abuse, murder, and to help find the missing women from Native American reservations.

(headsup from TeaAtTrianon).

Why the Federal Government? Because the FBI is in charge of investigating major crimes like murder on the reservation. This initiative will extend their expertise to help local tribal police to investigate the less serious crimes and suspected crimes as in missing persons.

LINK1 is the Federal statement of goals and initiatives.

MMIP coordinators will work closely with federal, tribal, state and local agencies to develop common protocols and procedure for responding to reports of missing or murdered indigenous people

Specialized FBI Rapid Deployment Teams will bring needed tools and resources to law enforcement.

The department will perform in-depth analysis of federally supported databases and share the results of this analysis with our partners in this effort.

Summary of this can be found at the Epoch Times which notes the tribes are pleased but they note this is a small effort, and more is needed, given the extend of the problem:

The Urban Indian Health Institute found, citing statistics from the National Crime Information Center, that there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls in 2016 while only 116 cases were logged in the DOJ’s federal missing person database, according to a February report.

most of these are runaways or just people who decided to move away without telling anyone in their extended family, but too many are found dead and the reason is never discovered.






sigh.

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the problem of modernization causing the destruction of traditional cultures is world wide, and is the argument in the background of the Pope's "Amazon synod":

and the Pope is causing a debate by backing the clueless German/liberation theology liberals against the clueless traditional  Catholics, and the whole argument is frustrating to me because both sides are so embedded in ideology that they don't understand the problem.

Question: Do you respect the culture so much that you refuse to interfere with their customs, even terrible ones like infanticide, kidnapping women and children from other tribes,  etc.? 

And if you are "traditional" and want to convert them, do you understand that they don't think like you, so maybe you need to understand (and love them) and that a lot of good customs of their culture can be incorporated into their daily religious activity?

to quote Camus:

“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point...there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”

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so how does one understand a culture where people have different priorities and who think completely differently from your own culture?

reading anthropology books help. 

And sometimes ordinary books/movies give a little insight.

When I worked short term physician on the Navajo reservation, the nurses told me to read Tony Hillerman's books to get some understanding of everyday tribal customs and attitudes.

One of our docs would tell our visiting physicians that if they wanted to understand the frustration of our patients that sometimes would burst out with violence and substance abuse, they should watch the movie "Once Were Warriors", a film about the Maori trying to cope with modernism.

another more optimistic film that gives some insight to Indian humor being used to cope can be seen in Smoke Signals.

the film that alerted many Americans to the problem of the missing Native American was the film "Wind River", which I didn't like because it was a white person's point of view (why is the lead character a white guy? And the FBI agent was a clueless blond who didn't know it's cold in Wyoming in winter? Most of our FBI guys I met on the res were middle aged and had some knowledge of the culture.)

a quick google will give information about other aspects of the problem.

the MMIW is one organization that is helping families to search for their missing loved ones: VOA report on their work here.

the problem of missing women is also a problem in Canada LINK

and I won't even go into the many many reports of abuse at the boarding schools in the past.