"Aboriginals face risk of violent crime, survey indicates"

By Paul Baswick

SIX NATIONS - Aboriginals are falling victim to violent crime at about two-and-a-half times the rate of the general Canadian population, a newly-released Statistics Canada report on violent crime victimization indicates.

The Aug. 8 report, based on a 1999 survey of 26,000 Canadians aged 15 and older, also reveals aboriginal women are three times as likely to report being victims of spousal violence.

"When we did the analysis the we fond that the rate of violent crime, in general rates of victimization, were highest amongst aboriginal peoples," says Karen Mihorean, chief of Stats Canada's Integration Analysis program, the criminologist responsible for crunching numbers for the report.

"We found that reates overall were higher in violent crimes -- they're bout two-and-a-half times higher than the national average, and incidents of spousal violence are about three times higher than the national average. That translates into 206 incidents per 1000 people 15 years of age and older for aboriginals, and for the Canada level it's 81 incidents per 1000 population, 15 and older."

The discrepencies, she says, has much to do with therelatively young age of today's Aboriginal population.

"When we looked at this, we tried to explain why this is, so we did various analyses of the data," says Mihorean.

"What we find is that the strongest predictor of violent crime, or the factor that's most strongly correlated with being a victim of a violent crime, is age -- being young, specifically."

Mihorean says the survey shows people aged 15 to 24 run nine times the risk of falling victim to violent crime compared to other age groups.

"When you look at the demographics of various populations in Canada, there are some big differences. We know that the aboriginal population is a very young population, so it certainly makes sense that their rates are higher.

Age also suggests why the rate of victimization among immigrants was lower than the national average, she says.

"In general, if you look at census data, the immigrnt population tends to be older. So it makes sense, then, that their victim rates are less, because they tend to be older, and we know that victim rates are highst among the young population."

Mihorean says this is the first Stats Canada survey on violent crime victimization to include information on victims' race and cultural background.

"For the first time we did have a question on there about race/cultural background, so it allowed us to look at aboriginal people as well as visible minority groups," says Mihorean, who adds Stats Canada produces a report on violence victimization about once every five years.

"We were able to identify the immigrant population, but we were never able to identify people from various other cultures or racial background. Because of Canada's growing diverse population we wanted to look at how victimization impacts on vrious groups -- does it impact on them differently."

Mihorean stresses only the cultural backgrounds of victims, not those of perpetrators of violent crime, were looked at in the survey.