MMIW Stuff

Savanna's Act is Federal US law intended to address the MMIW crisis. It was introduced to Congress in 2019 and became law in 2020. A description from that link says in part:

This bill directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to review, revise, and develop law enforcement and justice protocols to address missing or murdered Native Americans.

Not Invisible Act of 2019 is similarly about the MMIW crisis and violence against Natives. In five pages, it uses the word prevention just two times.

Under the handles Mz and DoreenMichele, I used to comment somewhat often on topics like rape on the overwhelmingly male forum Hacker News. Here's a blurb from one such comment:

I don't want revenge. I want constructive change that overall reduces how much people get victimized.

Here's one about a guy testing for his life because of Twitter policy not protecting him in a politically charged situation:

That's not the premise. This kind of bullshit is exactly how disempowered groups get painted into a corner.

Sexual assault doesn't typically begin with violent rape. It ends there.

It begins with a million small forms of disrespect.

Political crap follows the same pattern.

One extremely dismissivr reply to that begins: Lol, disrespect is the beginning of rape? 

Three Posts from a defunct blog called Native Influence gives my take on something Native women can do in the here and now to try to be safer.

(I did eventually revive the blog Native Influence.)

I don't really write about law per se and how to make better LAWS. I write about social analysis.

Laws are frequently at their most useful after something has gone terribly wrong and I would like to focus on prevention. 

We are unlikely to see any laws about how to prevent violence against Native women any time soon because no one actually knows how to do that. So it's an unreasonable edict.

I'm interested in questions like "How DO you actually DO that?" and I contemplate where trouble begins and how to address it before it's a great conflagration and is merely some disrespectful asshole flicking a cigarette out a car window in a drought ravaged forest and LAUGHING about it and objecting to anyone blaming him for doing significant harm.

I'm interested in understanding the big picture and the pertinent details for specific cases. And hypothetically that may help judges and lawyers figure out how to best administer existing laws.

But I don't really know what to suggest for writing better laws in a changing social landscape and the reality that you cannot solve a problem from the same mindset that created the problem.

People looking to better document violence against Natives and create committees about Violence against Natives and trying to make rules for diversity and representation of members of those committees are explicitly accepting that the violence will continue and hoping to mitigate it or more effectively cope with the aftermath.

They aren't really wondering how this happens and what would need to change to substantially reduce those figures.

I wonder about things like that. I hypothesize about things like that. And I write about things like that.

LOL, disrespect for Natives couldn't POSSIBLY be why they get murdered at ten times the usual rate while everyone goes "Meh. Nothing much to be done about it. We'll like pretend to care and document it and write federal laws demanding we document it and otherwise just accept this is how it is."