Violence Against Women Special Issue: What’s the Pence Line? By Jeff Edleson

Reposted from tpt
Ellen Pence (1948-2012) was a scholar and a social activist. She co-founded the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, an inter-agency collaboration model used in all 50 states in the U.S. and more than 17 countries. A leader in both the battered women’s movement and the emerging field of institutional ethnography, she was the recipient of numerous awards including the 2008 Society for the Study of Social Problems Dorothy E. Smith Scholar Activist Award for significant contributions in a career of activist research. She died of breast cancer on January 6.
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This past week I was honored to testify before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in Washington DC regarding sexual violence against American Indian/Alaska Native women and girls. Here is the link to the hearing: S 1763 – the Stand Against Violence and Empower Native Women Act

Thank you all for your support!

Suzanne Koepplinger
Executive Director
Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center

Garden of Truth: Stories of Native Sex Trafficking Victims in Minnesota

Reposted from the TC Daily Planet

On October 27, the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition (MIWSAC) and Prostitution Research & Education (PRE) released a new report called Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota, the first-of-its-kind based on interviews and surveys with more than 105 Native women aged 18-60 in the Twin Cities, Duluth and Bemidji.  The report was written by Melissa Farley, Nicole Matthews, Sarah Deer, Guadalupe Lopez, Christine Stark, and Eileen Hudon.

The study found that of the 105 women, about half had been victims of sex trafficking, 92 percent had been raped, 84 percent had been physically abused during prostitution, 72 percent had suffered traumatic brain injuries from prostitution, 98 percent were currently or previously homeless, and 39 percent entered prostitution before age 18. In addition, the study found that 72 percent of the women saw a connection between prostitution and colonization.

Prostitution Verses Sex Trafficking

The research for the report was conducted about women involved with both prostitution and sex trafficking in part because of the “multiple legal definitions at the federal, state, and tribal levels and the varying degrees of understanding among those working on social justice issues and the general population” of sex trafficking, according to the report. The federal definition of sex trafficking is “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act,” while the Minnesota statutory definition of sex trafficking is

(1) receiving, recruiting, enticing, harboring, providing, or obtaining by any means an individual to aid in the prostitution of the individual; or (2) receiving profit or anything of value, knowing or having reason to know it is derived from an act described in clause (1).

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