Violent crime and characteristics of twelve Inuit communities in the Baffin Region, Northwest Territories

摘要

Geographically isolated in the remote Canadian eastern arctic, the Inuit communities of the Baffin Region, Northwest Territories share a common cultural and historical heritage that makes the area a unique setting for the study of violent crime among aboriginal peoples. Despite that uniqueness, however, the communities of the Baffin Region have high rates of violent crime that are typical of those found in aboriginal populations across North America. Previous attempts to account for the high rates of violent crime in aboriginal communities have generally relied upon one of two perspectives; both the socio-economic circumstances brought about by the process of colonization and the factors surrounding the consumption of alcoholic beverages have each been looked to for explanations of violent crime in aboriginal communities. Both of these perspectives were considered in this dissertation to account for the rates of violent crime in the Baffin Region communities. Indicators of community-level characteristics related to the consumption of alcohol and to the circumstances surrounding the colonization process were used to examine community-level measures of violent crime. Some of the community characteristics were more adept at accounting for violent crime rates than were others. Of the characteristics related to the use of alcoholic beverages, the presence or absence of local alcohol prohibitions did more to explain violent crime rates in Baffin Region communities than did the average amount of alcohol consumed in a community. Likewise, of the circumstances brought about by the colonization process, the violent crime rate in Baffin Region communities appeared to have more to do with whether a community was settled by forced relocation and less to do with measures of levels of socio-economic deprivation. These findings suggest that violent crime in aboriginal communities cannot be attributed to colonization or to alcohol use by themselves. Instead, a clearer understanding of violent crime patterns in aboriginal communities emerges with a detailed examination of certain aspects of those general factors.