Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

NNSL (Sep 03/99) - Yellowknife resident Irene Kakfwi says she has lived with violence all her life.

To help reduce its frequency, she is speaking out and encouraging others to do the same so there is more support for people to bind together and support each other.

"People just let it go," the 41-year-old mother of six said.

"When I was growing up I saw it as love. Now I know it's not. It's wrong."

Kakfwi's abuse started at her parent's house and included emotional abuse from her mother, she said.

Once, in a particularly painful memory, when census takers came to the door and asked about who lived in the house, Kakfwi's mother told them in front of Kakfwi that she was not part of the family.

Arlene Hache, who works at the Yellowknife Women's Centre said similar abuse happened in her past.

"From my perspective I couldn't remember a time when I hadn't been abused," she said.

"That includes hitting, getting beaten up, getting strapped with anything that was handy, yelling and screaming and being told that I was worthless."

Hache said one obstacle to the solution in helping people get beyond violence is that society is often blinded by companion alcohol problems.

She said the truth is that there are incredible levels of violence, sexual abuse and sexual assault that many Northerners are dealing with.

"They drink or do drugs to escape it for a second or a minute or a day," Hache said.

"Society would rather deal with the fact that this person is a drunk than that this person has been so traumatized and so hurt by people around them."

The confounding variable of excessive drinking becomes even more problematic, according to Hache, because often the alcohol treatment sessions are co-ed.

The problem with this is that many men and women in these programs have not learned how to interact with each other in a healthy way.

"What happens if someone doesn't know how to say 'no' to people?" Hache asked.

"If she has been raped since she was six years old and some guy in a treatment program comes up to her to have sex with her she will have learned by then that what to do is to just lie there and not say anything and to just hope it's over soon."

A better solution, Hache said, is to learn the self-confidence to be able to say, 'no, I'm not going to do that. That's not what we're here for.'