From: cmg_jr@ix.netcom.com

Date: 01/28/01 09:55:34

Subject: Young Indian Children in Saskatchewan, Canada Sexually Exploited

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 8-year-old prostitutes stun Saskatchewan politicians

 © 2001 Toronto Globe’s Mail, Canadian Press, Regina  

January 6, 2001

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Children as young as eight years old are selling sex on Saskatchewan's streets, social Services officials told shocked politicians yesterday in an all-party committee studying the problem.

Saskatoon police have witnessed johns trying to buy sex from four and five-year-olds, said Randy Pritchard, Social Services’ senior program consultant.

Mr. Pritchard said poverty and peer pressure play a big part in children ending up on the street.

He said youngsters use the money they make as prostitutes to buy things they are not getting at home, such as drugs, make-up and clothes.

They also feel as though they belong to a family of sorts on the street, he said, and sometimes lure their friends or younger siblings into the same work.

Street children typically miss a lot of school, have substance-abuse problems and are coping with sexual and physical abuse at home, said Dan Perrins, deputy minister of social Services.

“The reason they choose street life is because the alternative is worse, and unfortunately the alternative is home,” he said.  

Johns may be seeking out younger sex partner because they think children are less likely to carry sexually transmitted diseases, suggested Laura Bourassa, Crown counsel from the justice Department.

But she added, “You only need to have one sexual encounter to risk getting a sexually transmitted disease.  The chances are you are not the child’s first sexual encounter.”

She estimated that as many as 200 children-most of them aboriginal-are working in each of Saskatchewan’s two major cities and as many as 85 are in Prince Albert. 

From: cmg_jr@ix.netcom.com

Date: 12/06/00 00:40:28

Subject: Indigenous youth make up 90 percent of Canada's child, teen prostitutes.

Dear friends of human rights - FYI.  - Chuck Goolsby

From:    cmg_jr@ix.netcom.com

Date:    12/06/00 00:08:27

Subject: Re: Aboriginals make up majority of young prostitutes

Hi L.,

Thank you much for this information.  I guess you know that I have, in the past, made the same point.  Not a nice point to make, and one that goes against cultural currents that  stress covering up any reality that can cause an individual embarrassment within those cultures.

In the age of HIV/AIDS, those codes of silence have to end, or the sexual oppression of indigenous youth, which is common throughout all regions in the Americas, will cause a permanent end to the indigenous peoples affected.  To stop that result, people must begin to speak up and defend our young people.

People of conscience everywhere need to understand that reality as it relates to youth of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.

 - Chuck Goolsby

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Aboriginals make up majority of young prostitutes

© 2000 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Dec 4, 2000

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OTTAWA - A government report has found that up to 90 per cent of child and teen prostitutes in Canada are aboriginal.

The 97-page report, called "Sacred Lives," says the aboriginal community faces unacceptable risks of being dragged into the commercial sex trade.

Risk on the street

The study, which includes interviews with 150 aboriginal youth who have been sexually exploited, says it's vital for them to re-establish cultural connections.

The report was done by Save the Children Canada and the federal government and released on Monday.

The authors, Cherry Kingsley and Melanie Mark, found that widespread racism, declining culture, and crushing poverty are among the reasons native youth end up on the streets.

One native youth interviewed in the report said they're targets for prostitution because they're vulnerable and used to the exploitation.

Kingsley and Mark, who are both native, travelled across Canada for five months to do the study.

"It was a really haunting, gruelling experience," Kingsley said on Monday.

"These young people came forward with the hope things would be different and they deserve a response," she said.

The report recommends a series of round-table discussions and building a national youth network.

"There's no sex trade in the world that can survive unless we let it collectively, and it's thriving," Kingsley said.

Last month, an international report suggested a lack of government planning is turning Canada into a hot spot for the sexual exploitation of children.

 From: cmg_jr@ix.netcom.com

Date: 11/02/00 12:30:28

Subject: Canadian indigenous boarding school rape victim lawsuits to bankrupt Canadian churches

Dear friends of human rights,

The use of violent sexual assault as a tool of the oppression of indigenous (Indian/Native) women, minor girls and boys and even men, has been a feature of life in the Americas since 1492.  Within the U.S., numerous government and church run boarding schools have been the location of mass rapes of Indian children.  Several years ago, over 400 children in a school in the Southwest were the victims of such assaults.  A Lakota psychologist found, in the 1970's, a school in the U.S. Northwest where 80 of the 120 girl boarding school students had been raped by non-Indians from the local town.  All over Latin America, many indigenous women and minor girls continue to suffer the fate that their mothers and grandmothers have suffered since 1492 at the hands of men who rape them with impunity.

These policies, together with the actions of the U.S. Indian Health Service in their forced sterilization campaign against indigenous women, in which 70,000 women were victimized in the 1960's and 1970's, represents genocidal violence that has been perpetrated with impunity.

A couple of years ago, a Canadian indigenous chief spoke on CBC, the Canadian Broadcast System, heard locally in DC on WAMU FM, a public radio station.  This chief related how he, after being forced to go to a religious run boarding school, was subjected to routine beatings, electric shock and RAPE, from the age of 12, perpetrated by clerics at the school.

Please find here below an excerpt of the beginning of an article from the November 2, 2000 edition of the New York Times regarding this issue in Canada.

As the descendant of Catawba and Muskogee Creek peoples who also faced this racist madness, I encourage all of you to act, in this day and age, to assist the women and minor girls in our local communities who continue to suffer sexual assault from men who act with brazen impunity.  Why?  In many cases, it is because indigenous women and girls are not viewed as having even the right to their own bodies, nor to the human dignity and protection from crime that we take for granted.

Sincerely,

- Chuck Goolsby

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Indian Lawsuits on School Abuse May Bankrupt Canada Churches

New York Times - November 2, 2000

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/02/world/02CANA.html

By JAMES BROOKE

(Excerpt)

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 REGINA, Saskatchewan

Lawsuits filed by thousands of former Indian boarding school students in Canada, claiming

sexual, physical and "cultural" abuse, threaten to swamp the financial resources of four mainstream Christian churches that ran the schools until 1970.

"I simply see us going broke," Duncan D. Wallace, the Anglican bishop of Qu'Appelle, which encompasses Regina, said of his diocese.  With resignation, he added, "When you get down to it, all we need is a bottle of wine, a book and a table, and we are in business."

Settlements could snowball into billions of dollars, devastating the financial resources of Canada's four old-line Christian churches: Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian and United Church. By the end of next year, the Canadian government forecasts, 16,000 Indians will have entered some form of claim; that number is equal to 17 percent of the living alumni of the boarding schools.

Already there are four class-action suits against the churches and the government, which had the churches run schools in distant communities under contract.

Indian plaintiffs have won all five boarding school abuse trials held in the last two years two in Saskatchewan and three in British Columbia. In the Saskatchewan cases, both involving sex abuse, and both filed against the government, one plaintiff won $54,000 and the other $114,000. In the British Columbia cases, lawyers for the government and the churches negotiated secrecy over damage awards.

Auditors for the Anglican Church of Canada predict that legal fees alone will push the church into bankruptcy next year.

"There is a lot of denial, people thinking this is a bad dream," Bishop Wallace said of the responses of priests and parishioners to the claims. "I told a priest recently, `When your rectory gets sold out from underneath you and you are living in the street, maybe you will understand this is for real.' "

Parishioners have proposed selling the oldest church in Alberta to raise $2 million for legal costs and settlements faced by the United Church of Canada. In Manitoba, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a Roman Catholic order, want to hand over to the federal government virtually all their property in the province in return for Ottawa's assuming liability for about 2,000 claims against the order. The Oblates fear that legal bills will eat up their assets before any money can flow to legitimate claimants.

In British Columbia, some members of the now bankrupt Anglican diocese of Cariboo, embittered with the government, propose complying with a government order to inventory church art for auction by sending their Sunday school drawings to Ottawa.

Behind the suits is the real pain of many Canadian Indians who were rounded up and forced into the schools.

 --(End of Exceprt)--------------------------------------

 http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/02/world/02CANA.html

Sacred Lives, Canadian Aboriginal Children & Youth Speak Out About Sexual Exploitation by: Save the Children, Canada (referred to in article #2 above).  This book is available in print form for $5.00 shipping from: Save the Children, Canada http://www.savethechildren.ca/en/whatwedo/publicat.html (see cover below).  The book is available online in pdf format (requires that you have Acrobat Reader player installed on your PC): http://www.savethechildren.ca/en/whatwedo/pdf/sacredlives.pdf