Group fights violence against tribal women

By Judy Gibbs Robinson
The Oklahoman

Pauline Musgrove will never forget the night her first husband beat her and choked her for more than an hour before police arrived -- and carted her off to jail in handcuffs.

Did you know?

American Indian women are more than twice as likely to be sexually assaulted as women of any other ethnic group. Following is the number of assaults per 1,000, age 12 or older:

All races: 2

White: 2

Black: 2

Indian: 5

Asian: 1

Race of offender

About 9 in 10 American Indian victims of rape/sexual assault report they were attacked by someone of another race:

White: 78 percent

Black: 8 percent

Other: 14 percent

Source: U.S. Justice Department, Bureau of Justice Statistics, "American Indians and Crime, 1992-2002"

Teenager tackles root of violence

Charged with assault and battery because she fought back, Musgrove sat in a Tulsa County jail cell overnight with a broken pelvis and fractured vertebra while her uninjured husband, still in a rage back at the house, destroyed all her belongings.

Although the charge was later dropped by a judge who apologized to Musgrove and scolded her former husband, she will never forget.

The memory keeps her passionate about her work as director of Spirits of Hope, a statewide coalition of groups fighting domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking in Oklahoma Indian Country. With violence against Indian women approaching epidemic levels, their work keeps growing.

"People don't want to know these things are happening, but a lot of women out there are being abused," said Musgrove, who is Cherokee.

The statistics are daunting: Indian woman are 2.5 times more likely to be victims of domestic violence than any other race or ethnic group; 3.5 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault; twice as likely to be stalked, according to the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence Against Women.

"Violence against women has reached epidemic proportions in many Indian communities," said Tex Hall, outgoing president of the National Congress of American Indians in an Oct. 31 speech in Tulsa.

Oklahoma-specific numbers are not available but probably are comparable, said Sarah Deer, a staff attorney for the Tribal Law and Policy Institute in West Hollywood, Calif. She was instrumental in organizing Spirits of Hope while employed by the Office of Violence Against Women in the U.S. Justice Department.

"Those statistics seem accurate to people who are manning the hot lines, opening the shelter doors and talking to women who need legal counsel," Deer said.

In September alone, Spirits of Hope processed 32 applications from battered Oklahoma women seeking legal assistance -- in most cases, a court order forbidding the batterer to have any contact with the victim, said Gail Jelinek, Musgrove's assistant.

While drugs, alcohol, mental illness and other social problems contribute to those grim statistics, advocates say a checkerboard of police and court systems in Indian Country makes things worse.

First comes the question of jurisdiction. In criminal cases on Indian land, race of the criminal, race of the victim, nature of the crime and status of the land where the crime occurred all can affect who investigates and prosecutes.

"The tribes have no jurisdiction over non-natives. Therefore, if you are non-native, you can batter in Indian Country and if the federal government won't take the case, the batterer will go free," said Kelly Stoner, director of the Native American Legal Research Center at Oklahoma City University School of Law.

Unless a tribe has its own law enforcement, investigating crime in Indian Country falls to the FBI, which is not organized as a first-line responder, said Edward Snow, assistant U.S. attorney for Oklahoma's Northern District. And tribal law enforcement -- including that provided by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs -- is simply inadequate given the scale of the domestic violence problem, Snow said.

"Their budget is stretched so thin, they can't enforce everything like we expect our local police to," he said.

Sometimes cases fall through the cracks as prosecutors and law enforcement hash out jurisdiction questions, Deer said. More often, Indian women feel hopeless and helpless and simply fail to report, Snow said.

"I don't think they feel the programs do much for them. They've really been treated rather poorly and this distrust is rather high, especially in a rural community," Snow said.

Of the 300 or so criminal cases on Indian land filed last year by his office, no more than 15 were cases of violence against women, said Snow, who serves as a liaison between his office and northern Oklahoma tribes.

Even when tribes have clear jurisdiction, investigate and prosecute a batterer or rapist in their own courts, current law ties their hands. Their sentencing authority is limited to one year imprisonment and a fine of $5,000.

Indian advocates wanted to change that this year in legislation extending the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The version now before a congressional conference committee includes, for the first time, a section recognizing the magnitude of the problem in Indian Country and earmarking for tribes 10 percent of all federal funding for domestic violence programs. It does not give tribal courts greater sentencing authority, Deer said.