Anchorage Daily News

Violence against Native women in Alaska continues at an alarming rate. At a conference in Anchorage on Tuesday, a speaker asked how many women in the room, who were mostly Natives, had been violently assaulted. Half the women indicated they had.

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Alaska has had the highest rate of forcible rape in the nation for 10 years in a row. In Alaska, Native women are assaulted sexually more often than women of other races. They are abused by men whose judgment is lost in a bottle of alcohol. They are sometimes assaulted when they themselves are so intoxicated they don't know it is happening. Until it's over.

Unlike you might expect, most sexual assaults against Native women are by people the women know, and a majority are by Native men, a recent study shows.

That speaks to the need for local solutions -- village police officers and counselors to help victims, local leaders teaching respect for women, local controls on alcohol.

If there are not safe houses for whole families, a woman will just stay in her home and take whatever abuse is meted out there, said tribal administrator Tammy Aguchak from Mountain Village. "A woman will not leave her children."

A homegrown women's shelter in Emmonak, some 200 miles by airplane from Bethel, had operated for about 30 years, when the former Murkowski Administration decided to take its funding away in 2005.

To find refuge from abuse, the state said the women could fly to Bethel or Dillingham.

When the Emmonak shelter closed, some women and elders did not find a way to get to Bethel. They huddled near the Emmonak shelter though it wasn't open, because they felt it was a safe place, said Lynn Hootch, a Yup'ik Eskimo, and the shelter's executive director.

The Emmonak shelter still has not returned to 24-hour service. It has a federal grant that allows it to operate during daytime working hours. If a person calls ahead, the shelter will try to arrange for someone to stay with them in the shelter overnight.

Christine Ashenbrenner, executive director of the Council on Domestic Violence, which distributes government money to various shelters, said she's encouraged Emmonak to apply again next year for money to operate on a 24-hour basis.

With rising costs for fuel, food, and other expenses, it's a challenge to pay for rural shelters.

But the council under the Palin administration is not attempting to consolidate, or to close local shelters, she said.

The conference, Ashenbrenner said, "really emphasized for me that communities know the answer -- and that what they need is support. Bureaucrats in Juneau are not going to find the answers."

The idea seems right; it needs strong leaders to carry it out.

BOTTOM LINE: State leaders should figure out how to better support local groups dealing with violence against Native women.

Assaults against Native women

78 -- Average rate of forcible rapes per 100,000 people reported to public safety officers in Alaska from 1996 to 2005.

33.3 -- National average rate of forcible rapes per 100,000 in the same period.

56 -- Percentage of sexual assault patients in the latest state study who were Alaska Natives.

16 -- Percentage of assaults against Alaska Native women that resulted in convictions in that study.

52.5 -- Percentage of times the suspect in an assault against an Alaska Native woman was also Native.

42 -- Percentage of times that was true in Anchorage.

6 -- Percentage of times that was true in Fairbanks.

98 -- Percentage of times that was true in Bethel.

89 -- Percentage of offenders who were known to the victims.

Sources: Daily News archives, Descriptive Analysis of Sexual Assault Nurse Examinations in Alaska by Andre Rosay of UAA and Tara Henry, Forensic Nurse Services; and oral presentation by Henry.

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