“What do I tell my daughter when she is raped?”
This was the question posed to Charon Asetoyer, CEO of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center by a young mother on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in Lake Andes, South Dakota.
“The feeling ... I can’t even begin to explain how that made me feel. Not if she’s raped, but when she’s raped,” said Asetoyer of the Comanche tribe. “We’re aware of how bad the problem is in our reservation community, but when somebody puts it to you that way, you realize it’s even worse than you thought it was.”
Asetoyer is well aware that Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault crimes than all other races in the US and that more than one in three Native American women report having been raped during their lifetime. She speaks with survivors of sexual assault in her community every day.
Recognizing an immediate need to prepare and support indigenous young women in the likely event of a sexual assault, Asetoyer and her colleagues teamed up with graphic designer Lucy M Bonner to create a graphic novel entitled, “What To Do When You’re Raped: An ABC Handbook for Native Girls”. The book is available to download free online or to order in print.
Each letter of the alphabet starts a conversation about rape trauma and where to go for help. The book was written in easy to understand language so as to make it accessible to everyone, including children.
The letter “C” is for: “Currently, more than 9 out of 10 Native girls have been forced to have sex when they don’t want to, and that is always rape, even if it’s on a date.”
The letter “F” is for: “It is not ever your fault. You did not ‘ask for it.’ You are not alone.”
The letter “G” is for: “Get emergency contraception.” Until 15 October 2015, Indian Health Service pharmacies and clinics did not have policies in place to follow the federal mandate making Plan B available over the counter. Asetoyer says many native women and girls don’t know that this is an option available to them or face resistance when they ask for it from their primary healthcare provider. The ABC handbook outlines their reproductive rights: “By law they have to give it to you no matter what, and you don’t have to give them a reason, see a doctor, have an exam, or get a prescription.”
Maya Torralba of the Kiowa, Comanche and Wichita tribes says she could have used a book like this when she was a girl. At the age of 14, she was roofied and raped by an acquaintance. He was never arrested and she never received counseling. She is now an advocate for young women in Anadarko, Oklahoma.
“My family and I just didn’t know how to handle that or how to even talk about it. It was really traumatic, of course. If somebody had been able to hand me that book at that point it would have been so much help,” Torralba said. “We need to speak out more about our survival and how we’ve been able to get better and to heal. To make it known, so that when this happens to younger native women, they know that they can talk to somebody. They know that it’s not something to just sweep under the rug. It’s OK to get help.”
According to the US Department of Justice, in at least 86% of the reported cases of rape or sexual assault against American Indian and Alaska Native women, survivors report that the perpetrators are non-Indian men.
“The truckers come in and out, the ranchers and farmers come to party on the weekend. We have our casinos, we have the hunters and fishermen, we have the big biker rally,” Asetoyer said. “Then there are the man camps up in North Dakota on the oil rigs where pimps are trafficking native girls up from South Dakota.”
A report by Amnesty International in 2007 found that native victims of sexual violence get caught in a complex jurisdictional maze between tribal, state and federal authorities.
“Three main factors determine which of these justice systems has authority to prosecute such crimes: whether the victim is a member of a federally recognized tribe or not; whether the accused is a member of a federally recognized tribe or not; and whether the offence took place on tribal land or not. The answers to these questions are often not self-evident and there can be significant delays while police, lawyers and courts establish who has jurisdiction over a particular crime. The result can be such confusion and uncertainty that no one intervenes, and survivors of sexual violence are denied access to justice,” Amnesty International wrote in the report.
The reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013 empowered tribes for the first time to investigate and criminally prosecute non-natives in cases of domestic abuse. However, tribes still have no jurisdiction over non-natives who are perpetrators of sexual violence.
At a congressional briefing last month on the impact of VAWA 2013 in Indian country, tribal leaders spoke out on this issue. “Non-Indian offenders had the feeling they could do what they wanted to because there was no way they would be prosecuted. We could call county law enforcement but their response was very long or they would not come at all,” said Glen Gobin, vice chairman of the Tulalip Indian Tribes.
“Now the tribe can prosecute non-Indian offenders, but the jurisdiction is limited to certain crimes, it does not protect victims of stranger rape, and does not protect children or other family members.”
Asetoyer and Cherokee activist Pamela Kingfisher recently presented the ABC handbook at the Take Root Conference in Norman, Oklahoma. Kingfisher says the response was overwhelming.
“Every single native woman who picked up the handbook disclosed her own personal story of sexual abuse,” Kingfisher said. “It makes me sad that we’re teaching the ABCs of rape. Who’s teaching the men? What’s going to change the rape culture of this country?”