Why Data Collection is crucial in MMIW
The National Crime Information Center received 5,712 reports in 2016 about missing Native women who had been reported missing locally. In the database maintained by the Department of Justice, only 116 of these were listed. According to the Urban Indian Health Institute’s 2018 report, there have been 506 reported cases of missing or murdered Native women in the United States since 2010, but police have no record of 153 of those cases.
How does this gap occur ?
It’s impossible to find a database that tracks all reported cases of missing Native women in any jurisdiction. Cases (women) are lost due to a lack of cooperation and clarity between tribal, local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. Native women are not included in databases because of the lack of ethnic options (often categorized under different ethnicities, such as Hispanic, Asians and others), jurisdictional battles when reservation residents are discovered or reported missing elsewhere, and tribal inability to prosecute violent crimes such as rape.
Do you know if anything is being done about it?
This legislation, known as Savanna’s Act, is a federal legislative effort to develop guidelines for responding to cases of missing and murdered Native Americans and to increase tribal enrollment for victims in federal databases. A number of non-governmental organizations have also launched grassroots efforts to identify and document the cases of missing indigenous women.
Until next time.
If you would like to read the website where I found this information, please follow the link