Truthout Interviews Tanya Lee on Native American Gender-Based Violence

Tanya Lee. (Screengrab: Truthout)Also see: A National Disgrace: Violence Against Native Women

Tanya Lee speaks with Ted Asregadoo about the startlingly high rates of gender-based violence among Native American and Native Alaskan communities and the lack of access the victims of that violence have to the justice system.

What if you lived in a community where the chances of rape against women were as high as 100 percent? Moreover, what if your ability to seek justice against a perpetrator was hampered by laws that essentially protected them? It seems unimaginable, but in many Native American and Native Alaskan communities, the rate of gender-based violence is so high that Amnesty International and the United Nations have singled out not only skyrocketing rates of rape and domestic violence, but also the barriers many of these women face to get access to the courts to punish criminals.

Tanya Lee wrote a startling piece on Truthout about how bad the situation for Native American and Native Alaskan women is. There have been some reforms that the Obama Administration has enacted, but like many of the actions his administration takes, the law’s effectiveness is often thwarted by Republicans whose agenda on this matter is to keep native people in a permanent state of subjugation where crimes go unpunished and non-Natives are protected from prosecution.