First Nations Suicide Rate 3x Higher Than Rest of Society - Are Residential Schools to Blame?

Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation asks for long-term solutions in wake of suicides

Chief says community response teams inadequately trained, suicide prevention strategy non-existent

Bryan Eneas · CBC News 

Residents and leaders from the Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation are asking for the provincial and

federal governments to help them find a long-term solution to the recent suicides in the community.

(Morgan Modjeski/CBC)

Residents of the Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation are on edge and some are holding their children close, as the community of 1,000 people in northwest Saskatchewan looks to address a series of recent suicides.

There have been seven in the last two years alone — three of which occurred in recent weeks, including a 10-year-old girl who took her own life on Thursday.

"Right now it's really difficult for [the family]. They're having a tough time comprehending what has happened," said Joyce Weeseekase, a mental health therapist and aunt of the 10-year-old girl.

"It's been a really tragic incident that's happened. Knowing that it's just a 10-year old child, they still can't believe it's really happened." 

Representatives from the band, the province and the federal government have offered their support to families and community members affected by the suicides. 

But Weeseekase said it shouldn't have come to this. "It should have happened before this," she said of the supports being offered now. 

"I don't believe it should have [taken] something this tragic in order for that help to come here. It should always be here." 

Joyce Weeseekase, a mental health support worker in Makwa Sahgaiehcan, said help should have come before the recent deaths. (Morgan Modjeski/CBC)

Weeseekase said she hopes the band's call for action results in something tangible, rather than "lip service" that the community has seen before.

Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation Chief Ronald Mitsuing said the community is grieving. Mitsuing said the community's response teams aren't properly trained and there isn't a suicide prevention strategy in place. 

"The province, they've committed to come in and help for a while but we need something long-term, not just to come in here and train and leave," he said. "That would help us deal with a lot of this stuff." 

Response teams from the Meadow Lake Tribal Council have been dispatched to Makwa Sahgaiehcan, but Mitsuing is worried that once they leave, the band will once again be short-staffed and unequipped to deal with the problem.

For Mitsuing, part of the solution lies in creating a communication course that children and parents would participate in. "Our parents are very lacking in some places to support their children around here," he said. 

He encouraged children to talk to their parents, elders or leaders about what they are experiencing. 

Myriad issues impacting community

According to community leaders, Makwa Sahgaiehcan is plagued by a variety of issues that could be having a ripple effect on the children there.

Mitsuing said the community's school is overcrowded, which is leading to both online and in-person bullying and a competition for space at the school.

He said the community is planning an expansion to the school, but he asked the province in the meantime to find a way to provide extra portable classrooms for additional space.

Band councillor Tommy Littlespruce's granddaughter took her own life on July 10, 2019. His grandson also took his own life in 2018.

He speculated that the bullying issues, drug and alcohol abuse in the community and historical factors like colonialism and the impact of residential schools may be at the heart of the problem.

"I hate to use the residential schools, or the colonial effect, but they are a part of what's going on in our community," Littlespruce said. "But there is other stuff that is happening."

As I have stated before, I believe child sexual abuse occurred in some, if not most residential schools, and that survivors brought that abuse back to their communities along with alcoholism as a way of dealing with the abuse. Unfortunately, the deadly combination has probably lead to child sexual abuse becoming a generational phenomenon. Studies need to be done to determine if, and how many, children who attempt suicide have been sexually abused.

He said healing the community and healing the homes will have a ripple effect on the youth in particular.

'We need answers'

James Kytwayhat said his son was in the same class as the 10-year-old girl who took her life on Thursday. He called the community's call for help a desperate need. 

"We need answers. We have questions but no answers," he said. "A lot of people will come together in our community and share that with others, but it's our kids that need answers."

Kytwayhat said he's holding his son close every day and he knows other families are doing the same in their homes. He echoed the chief's sentiments that children and parents need to communicate with one another.

"A lot of people need to ask their kid these questions and not wait for them to tell them their problems," Kytwayhat said. 

"Talk with your kids. Listen to them. Ask them questions. It takes a lot for a child to come up to a parent or an adult and tell them 'I'm being bullied'... just take the time."

Mona Sock, a Life Stolen by Abuse

There is no doubt in my mind that the disturbingly large numbers of 

child suicides in remote First Nations communities has much to do with

child sex abuse

8th grader lived in foster home with

a convicted sex offender

By Karissa Donkin, CBC News

Mona Sock took her own life behind an arena on Elsipogtog First Nation in 2007. She would be 23 now. (CBC)

Martha Milliea worried about strange men on the street preying on her daughter Mona.

She didn't worry about the man inside the foster home where 13-year-old Mona Sock lived.

Mona had been staying at her sister Harmony's home on Elsipogtog First Nation, located about 90 kilometres north of Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, for several years.

Child protection workers who were supervising Mona didn't do a background check on Harmony's husband, Lonnie Francis.

Had they done a background check, they would have discovered Francis had a conviction for sexual assault.

They might have looked for another home for Mona. Mona might have been saved from abuse by Francis.

But they didn't.

On the afternoon of Sept. 26, 2007, a month shy of her 14th birthday, Mona disappeared. She would become one of at least 53 children known to child protection workers to die from unnatural causes in New Brunswick since 1997.  

Her death was reviewed by the province's child death review committee and sparked a deeper dive into the state of First Nations child welfare in the province.

Frantic search

Milliea was at work at the community gas station when a social worker came looking for Mona. The social worker wanted to ask the girl if Francis was abusing her, even though the social worker already knew the answer.

"She told me that Lonnie Francis was molesting [Mona] all this time," Milliea says.

The sexual abuse had just been reported to police that day. The social worker told Milliea to call an officer if she spotted her daughter.  

At about 8 p.m., when the gas bar was quiet, Milliea went outside and called Mona's name. She thought she might be hiding.

"You can come and live with me, babe," her mother yelled. "Just come out."

There was no response.

Milliea went straight home when her shift ended at 11 p.m.  She figured social workers might ask her to pick up Mona once they found her. Milliea's boyfriend continued to search outside on the reserve by the Richibucto River while Milliea made coffee and waited by the phone.

Finally, it rang. It was Mona's sister, Harmony.

"They found her," she said.  

All this time, Mona had been behind the arena.

Milliea asked if she should pick her daughter up.  She heard crying on the other end of the line.

Mona was gone, Harmony said. She'd taken her own life.

Mona Sock was 13 when she died. She loved karate and taking care of her nieces and nephews. (CBC)

Pictures and regrets

Pictures of Mona's face dot the walls of her older sister Renee Milliea's small home. There are school pictures and awards, glowing by candlelight.  

Renee's son was born after Mona died, but he blows kisses to the pictures every night before bed.

Renee and her mother spread more photos on the table, crying as they flip through them: Mona proudly holding her nieces, whom she loved to babysit. Mona at school, where she was an eighth grader.

She wanted to be something, they say.

The women play a memorial slideshow set to the tune of Martina McBride's Concrete Angel.

"It's hard to see the pain / Behind the mask / Bearing the burden / Of a secret storm."

Mona's mother and sister say she never showed any warning signs of mental illness.

"I didn't expect that it would happen like this," Renee says.

Mona Sock was born at a quarter to five in the morning on Oct. 25, 1993. (CBC)

Renee was in the delivery room when her little sister Mona was born at quarter to five the morning of Oct. 25, 1993. Renee, who was already an adult, was instantly in love with her new sister.

When Mona was a baby, she and her mother floated between Renee's home and Mona's father's home, breaking Renee's heart every time they left. The back and forth went on for years before Renee finally put her foot down.

"I said, 'Never again I'm going to take care of my mom's kids.'"

"That was the worst thing I said."

She wishes Mona came to live with her instead.

Prior conviction 

In 2009, two years after Mona's death, Francis was convicted of two counts of sexually assaulting her.

Court records show he'd also been convicted in 1999, years before Mona moved in, of sexual assault against a different person. 

According to parole board records, Francis engaged in sexual activity with Mona on at least two occasions over a two-week period.

He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.

"You told the board that your relationships with your wife had become very distant, you were unemployed, and sought comfort from your victim at the time of your offence," the board decision says.

"You know that your actions were wrong but nevertheless rationalized and justified them at that time."

According to the board, Mona had indicated to some people that if the abuse were revealed, she wouldn't want to live.

She hanged herself from a tree behind the recreation centre the day Francis was reported to police.

After the 13-year-old's suicide, the child death review committee publicly recommended better guidelines for background checks for foster parents.

It didn't tell the public that Mona had been allowed to live in a foster home with a convicted sex offender.

Bernard Richard, the former New Brunswick child and youth advocate, says "the rules were clear in the case of Mona Sock and there should have been a criminal background check."

A memorial for Mona

Behind Elsipogtog's graffiti-marked arena, beyond the snow-covered baseball diamond, a piece of yellow police tape still flickers in the wind.

It's been almost 10 years since police marked off the spot in the woods where Mona took her own life. Nearly a decade since Mona's family and friends placed a single white cross, draped in a scarf, to mark where she took her last breath.

The memorial has survived a decade's worth of winter storms and new seasons.

On the first anniversary of her death, family and friends gathered there to remember her. They released balloons that were all red, her favourite colour.

Mona is buried a few blocks away in a parish cemetery. The heart-shaped gravestone is framed by an angel.

Her stone is engraved with her last school picture.

Mona would be 23 now.

Do Women Abuse? A Female Survivors Story

This remarkable article from a woman who escaped child sex trafficking cuts deeply into the effects of child sex abuse on the brain and body, and how we may respond to those effects. It is a very interesting study.

Do Women Abuse? 

by  Rayanne K. Irving 

I will never forget the earth shattering, panic inducing moment when my own body appeared to have betrayed me – yet again. Roughly six months after escaping from the sex slave trade I was sitting on my mother’s couch in the middle of the night, awake and alone, watching the movie, “Bastard Out of Carolina” . During one scene – the stepfather pulled the main character, a little girl named “Bone”, onto his lap in the car consequently raping her.

Rayanne Kristin Irving

Now, most people’s reaction to this harrowing storyline would be of outrage, disgust, disbelief. My body’s reaction however was entirely of a different nature. Privately, my body became aroused – stimulated by the sight it was processing. Such a purely primal response, initiated by the unthinkable, was an unimaginable assault on my very sanity. And my 17-year-old logic terrified me. Was I a sexual predator because I had become physically turned on by the rape of a little girl? 

Truth for me, was that I had never taken part in sober, consensual intimacy. All I had known was coercion, rape, and prostitution up until that point in my life. The very act of my body responding to such a degree of violence despite how I mentally felt about rape and sex, shook my already collapsing core of character and integrity. That dirty little secret was to be the first of many “triggers” that would eventually, over time, rise to the surface for me. Marred by these “quirks ” I possessed yet tried so hard to hide, sparked the recognition that I was indeed more dysfunctional than I consciously knew. 

This begs the question: why did my body respond to the very things I consciously believed I loathed? Probing deeper to investigate the nature of my new paradoxical personality radically helped to change not only my own recognition of self, but also to find acceptance in my ever-shifting mental clarity. 

My journey opened me up to the expression of compassion for the oftentimes devastating, as well as maddening experience, it means to be ‘human’. Personally, I feel there is much left to interpret pertaining to the female sexual predator, largely due to a case of the ‘predator’ existing in a complex field of varied degrees. Often going unnoticed, under-reported, or worst of all, flat out denied. 

The simplified dictionary definition would have the word ‘predator’ described as a person who looks for other people in order to use, control, or harm in some way. Then there is the sexual predator definition: “A sexual predator is a person seen as obtaining or trying to obtain sexual contact with another person in a metaphorically “predatory” or abusive manner. Analogous to how a predator hunts down its prey, so the sexual predator is thought to “hunt” for his or her sex “partners.” 

The majority of public opinion regarding the ‘typecast’ sexual predator has long been saturated in judgment, reducing these individuals down to vile and sick human beings in possession of no moral consequence. Yet objectively lurking behind that stance, has also been some not so subtle double standards. Such as, to be raped is often rationalized as the responsibility of the victim (ie what did she wear, how was she behaving, who was she hanging out with). 

Another and mayhap far more damaging standard was that rape was generally, as well as during archival times lawfully, considered a crime only committed against women by men. The delusion that women could not be predators and men could not be raped was spoon-fed to the masses by way of gender stigmatization. Encompassing the subject of rape was the common visual association being only that of ‘penetration’. 

Due to gender stamping, grossly overlooked was the hard hitting actuality that overpowering to steal gratification was not the pinnacle in all abuse cases. Rather just in the reported ones. Emotional manipulation, deception, intimidation, fear, guilt, physical impairment, mental incapacity, manual stimulation and more kept the ever rising number of shame and guilt ridden victims quiet, especially boys who were raised to be men; thought incapable of being raped. 

To be male was to be the aggressor, the conqueror, virile, and therefore treated as invulnerable. The human body (male and female), when placed under extreme stress, fear, or stimulus, has been known to respond physically by attaining erection and even orgasm, regardless of any true arousal. The physical responses can lead to confusing emotions that, left to grow under the tier of shame, can even call into question one’s sexual orientation. 

All of this allows for the female predator to slip into myth. If you look at rape throughout history, it has absolutely nothing to do with gender, the way a person dressed, the way they spoke, or even where they happened to be at the time. Rape was and is used as a way to extract submission. A way to exercise one’s dominance and power. Not just over another human being but more often than not – over the perpetrators’ very own life. 

One of Psychology’s longest standing debates is that of Nature vs. Nurture. The argument takes place around whether a human’s development is predisposed in his DNA, or if the majority of it is influenced by environment and life experiences. But what if we took out the word versus, asserting instead that Nurture creates Nature and Nature configures Nurture. Existing in harmony, they are always transforming one another. 

I think that we can all agree the brain is the most complex, and often times mysterious organ in the human body. While the brain controls everything we do, not all action is conscious or voluntary. When the dynamic interplay between mind and body becomes compromised, in extreme cases it can destroy one’s whole outlook and experience of the world. 

Scientifically it has been proven that trauma, at any age, is capable of compromising communication between the limbic system (the emotional brain and home of the amygdala) and the cortex system (responsible for memory, perception, attention, awareness, thought and consciousness). When a synaptic transmission is shut down due to trauma the amygdala fires up, becoming overly reactive, as you are no longer able to find reason, organize or problem solve in the manner that involves conscious perception. The amygdala engages the survival mechanism of fight or flight; creating emotional memory through perception alone. Emotional memory is subconscious, therefore incapable of introspect i.e. ‘act now think later.’ Sometimes, or during repetitive (also referred to as complex) trauma, the brain can become ‘stuck’ in the flight or fight mode. Adaption to the intricate interpretation of information regarding its surroundings includes normalizing the outlook concerning it’s circumstantial habitat while also relying solely on the emotional memory (triggers) to act as an early warning system and ensure survival. 

We’ve all heard of muscle memory; we know that muscles are capable of storing ranges of physical motion. Were you aware that muscles can also store emotions, even misinterpreted ones? Emotional memory or perceptions of an experience are carried by the neurones in our brain and stored on a cellular level in our body. These emotions can create blockages of energy atop our main organs, causing stress and imbalances. If a stressor becomes ongoing, the body will attempt to ‘adapt’. Adaptation can include the borrowing of other energy resources and the releasing of hormones until all other energy is depleted. When the compensations become unsustainable, unidentifiable illnesses and more psychosomatic conditions can arise. 

In summary, consistent abuse and enormous amounts of stress lead only in one direction: exceeding normal homeostatic limits, thus initiating corresponding compensations. Change in your brain and body chemistry can lead to specific, subconscious behaviour drawn from implicit memory in order to adapt to the constant stressors. Beginning an actual physical reorganization of its own wiring, entering you into a state called allostasis – the point where you find a new way of ‘being’, ‘escaping’ or in extreme cases, ‘surviving’. 

You cannot have Ying without Yang, Light without Dark or Nature without Nurture, so why would the term ‘predator’ be so much more commonly appointed to man and not shared equally by the female? To answer the question of my seventeen year old self, did my physical response to rape make me a sexual predator? No. I recognize now that rape, the act or sight of it, at that time, set off physical and mental triggers accumulated from living in a constant state of flight or fight during my time ‘in the life’. However, having been personally recruited into the sex slave trade by a 15-year-old girl, and lastly pimped by a 30 something year old Madam taught me this short, if unscientific lesson. Prey can learn to become Predator in an extreme act of self preservation. 

If a woman, or anybody really, who comes from generational abuse, who was raised with abuse or exposed to it at any one time seeks to end the cycle of being or feeling victimized, they could or would turn into a predator and use dominance to claim back what could be seen as a portion of control over their life, even by way of becoming an accomplice, an instigator or dominant by sexually exploiting others. 

Written by Rayanne K. Irving  www.moxyglobal.org The post Do Women Abuse? A Female Survivors Story appeared first on GIVE THEM A VOICE .

Rising Number of Child Sex Abuse in Fiji 'Concerning'

Radio New Zealand International

Fiji Manamuca Arch

Fiji's hospitals are seeing increasing cases of child sexual abuse and putting the cause down to broken homes and urbanisation.

Dr Reati Mataika is a paediatrician at the Colonial War Memorial hospital in Suva and also works with the Ministry of Health on child protection.

She says cases have spiked in the last three to four years, and there are increasing numbers of juvenile offenders, many of whom are suspected of being victims themselves in the past.

Dr Mataika says complicated family arrangements provide opportunities for offenders.

"These children are actually more vulnerable to getting abused because of the circumstances surrounding their safety, where they are, who looks after them. We're seeing that with the rural to urban drift happening here and also because of the family breakdown in our community."

Reati Mataika says most abuse happens in the home, by extended family members or non-relations such as step-fathers.

She is correct on every count, but I would add the availability of internet pornography as a contributing factor.