The People's Record

Eric Cantor moves to protect white men from being prosecuted for raping American Indian women
December 16, 2012

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has been working lately with Vice President Joe Biden on reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), after it expired last year. That sounds like a good thing. But here’s the sticking point:

The rate of sexual assault on Native-American women is more than twice the national average. And according to Amnesty International, 86% of Native American women who are raped are attacked by non-Indians—who are beyond the reach of tribal authorities. As a result, “we have serial rapists on the reservation—that are non-Indian—because they know they can get away with it,” one native American activist told Salon.

So some House Republicans proposed a measure to fix the problem, by allowing tribal courts to try non-Indians in such cases, while still letting the defendants move the case to a federal court if they felt their rights weren’t being protected.

But Cantor—who’s seen as influential with the conservative wing of the House GOP caucus—is blocking the proposal, the Huffington Post reported last week, because he doesn’t want to give added jurisdictions to Indian tribes. And he is moving to kill the VAWA re-authorization over the dispute. 

Source

This is so shameful & absolutely without justification.

2/3 of American Indian women raped on reservations are raped by outsider non-American-Indian, mostly-white predators who go specifically into the reservations because they know that they won’t be prosecuted. I heard Deborah Parker speak earlier today about how women are even being dragged onto the reservations by their rapists, to avoid legal liability. This is so sick it makes me want to vomit. You know who else is sick? Eric Cantor & his rape-friendly supporters. Yuck.