The RCMP is collaborating with Native groups on a social media awareness campaign to invite public help in resolving cases of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. The Assembly of First Nations and the Native Women’s Association of Canada are cooperating in the campaign.
“It’s to raise awareness and to make sure that their faces are out there in the public arena so that if people have tips, with the public’s help we could potentially bring these women home, that’s the intent,” said RCMP Superintendent Tyler Bates, the director in charge of national Aboriginal policing and crime prevention services in Ottawa.
The campaign is not limited by the passage of time and includes cases both recent and historic.
“We certainly want to take every measure to contribute to bringing them home,” said Bates. “We’re hoping that by having the public look at the faces of these women, they will see that the human cost of these tragedies is real.”
The campaign, which began October 7, focuses on 10 cases of missing Aboriginal women on the RCMP’s Facebook and Twitter accounts at www.facebook.com/rcmpgrc and twitter.com/rcmpgrcpolice.
NWAC’s Sisters in Spirit campaign has documented over 600 cases of missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada.
“Aboriginal women are overrepresented as victims far too often,” Bates observed. “We’re deeply concerned for women who have left home and not come back.”
