A study by the Urban Indian Health Institute showed that of the 5,712 cases of missing Indigenous women reported in 2016, only 116 were logged in the Department of Justice database. Data analysis also shows that some counties had murder rates of Indigenous women that were more than ten times the national average. Unfortunately, the quality of this data is limited by the willingness of individuals to report violence to police and of law enforcement to designate deaths as homicide. A 2014 study in the American Journal of Public Health on causes of death in Indigenous American communities using data collected between 1999 and 2009 found that Indigenous women have a homicide rate triple that of white women.
Similarly, Latinx face a lack of investment in their safety, especially under the auspices of a government led by white supremacist men and enabled by white supremacist women to pretend that they don’t even deserve to seek safety. Buried in the anti-immigrant rhetoric that the GOP is currently espousing to justify building a wall is the sad fact that, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports, many of the women from Central America seeking asylum are fleeing gender violence.
Women and children, especially girls, as well as LGBTQIA people continue to face high levels of gender-based violence in the United States and around the world. Femicide (the murder of women) is a global issue. For example, in El Salvador, ranked number one in the world in female homicide, there were a reported 469 femicides in 2017, which means that on average, more than nine women or girls were killed every week in 2017. Many of the Latinx asylum seekers are women, children, and LGBTQIA people fleeing brutal physical and sexual violence at the hands of gang members and other individuals at home. Unfortunately, they may not find much greater safety in the United States or in Canada. We know that in the United States, an average of three women are killed every day by someone they know, usually a current or former partner. But because of the high number of missing persons, as well as the unsolved murders of marginalized women, girls, and femme-presenting people in the United States, we don’t have a concrete idea of the femicide rate in this country.
We know that of documented murders, 22 percent of the nearly fifteen thousand people killed every year in the United States are women, while only 11 percent of the murders in El Salvador are women. Although Canada’s overall murder rate is lower than that of the United States’, 30 percent of victims in Canada are women. Despite narratives that position other countries as less civilized and more dangerous for women and girls than the West, the reality is that rates of violence are among the worst in the world here.
For those with disabilities, the very caregivers they have to rely on may be their greatest threat. Though there are many committed caregivers out there doing a wonderful job of supporting loved ones, many disabled women and children are vulnerable to violence precisely because they are dependent on someone who may be taking advantage of them. Caregivers who care more about their own comfort and convenience than the basic rights and welfare of their charges are a dangerous necessity for many people who don’t have any other options.
These might come in the form of a family member experiencing fatigue, one with limited or nonexistent empathy, or a paid employee who’s there for the money, but not particularly concerned or otherwise invested in the welfare of their patient. Not only do disabled women in abusive relationships, whether it be with a romantic partner, a family member, or an employee, report the horror of losing control over access to food, bathing mobility, and their community, but some are being used solely for the minimal income that they may bring in from social services programs. An unbalanced power dynamic plus a lack of alternative care options can leave victims feeling trapped in situations that are ultimately dangerous.
Because of a societal bias toward sympathetic portrayals of the able-bodied caregiver, even when the outcome is the violent end of a person’s life, there is an unwillingness to see that these deaths are part of an epidemic of violence against women and children. Disability activist groups that attempt to draw attention to the problem and get the laws changed to better insulate people from abusive caregivers are facing an uphill battle.
Any chance of successfully combating this problem lies in the government’s willingness to follow the lead of the communities most impacted. Yet these are the same communities that have the most to fear from the police, and who are least likely to be respected, much less given adequate resources. This is especially obvious when the targets of violence are trans or nonbinary.
Trans people in the United States are facing increasing rates of violence as new reports reveal more murders and deaths of trans people than ever previously reported. Because of flaws in the way gender is recorded in statistics around violence, and because transphobic families are sometimes reluctant to report a gender identity that differs from the identity that is assigned at birth, any numbers are at best a small sample of those who have been lost.
Some trans women, like CeCe McDonald, have successfully fought attackers off and saved themselves, but at a high personal cost. After CeCe and her friends were accosted by three drunk people outside a bar in Minneapolis, CeCe was struck in the face with a glass, resulting in facial lacerations that needed stitches. When she attempted to run away, Dean Schmitz chased her and she ended up stabbing him. He died and CeCe McDonald was charged with second-degree murder. Though CeCe struck a plea deal and was ultimately sentenced to forty-one months in jail for second-degree manslaughter, the reality is that her fear was legitimate. Many trans women have not survived similar assaults, and nearly 90 percent of the trans people who have been killed were people of color. Yet self-defense can lead to imprisonment if you don’t fit into a convenient victim narrative. Look at the case of Cyntoia Brown, a woman facing fifty-one years in jail for killing a man who was sexually abusing her. Prosecutors and media imagery rendered a sixteen-year-old girl as a conniving adult woman engaged in sex work as though the idea that she had been trafficked and abused was anathema. These are cases where we at least have an idea of what happened. For many, they go missing and minimal police resources are committed to finding them.
Even when the missing are underage, and thus should be part of an Amber alert, if police assume they are runaways, that can prevent an Amber alert from being distributed until it is far too late. The reasons people go missing can range from illness to accident to interpersonal danger, with causes ranging from escaping domestic violence to human trafficking to serial killers; the variety is an obstacle to disappearances being investigated, much less solved, in any community.
Add in a pattern of media and police indifference, racism, lack of resources, and complicated jurisdictional issues between tribal, federal, and local law enforcement agencies, and the reasons the problem isn’t being addressed in a holistic way become clear. But instead of individual groups having to each plead for resources for their community, what might addressing these issues look like if everyone had access to the kind of resources usually devoted to missing white women? What if this was framed as everyone’s problem, not one relegated to the margins of society?
This doesn’t mean that white women who go missing don’t deserve every bit of attention, care, and concern from the public, police, and the press. It does mean that the same level of concern should be given to all. And this is an approach that can only help those in danger if they know that they have somewhere to turn. It will make predators less likely to target anyone if they know that there are no communities that will be ignored.