Where "Rape on the Reservation" Started

John Henion co-produced "Rape on the Reservation," premiering as part of Vanguard's fourth season on Wednesday, June 2, at 10/9c.

At Vanguard, an episode generally starts with an idea, maybe small, maybe big. It grows into a concept, then a treatment, a pitch, a production, a script, an edit, and—finally—a story. By the time we lock picture, where we started often looks like a wild and strange place.

“Rape on the Reservation,” part of the new season of Vanguard, is no exception. It started from a widely quoted statistic—that “non-Indian” perpetrators commit 86 percent of sexual assaults against Indian women (read: creepy white dudes cruise down to reservations because they know they can get away with rape against Indian women).

When I read the statistic I was floored. Article after article cited this 86 percent from two reports conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in 2000 & 2004. Amnesty International [PDF] quoted it, NPR, The Washington Post, The New York Times, everyone. It’s an eye popping stat for sure. The kind of stat that makes journalists, including myself, sit up straight and say, “now there’s story!”

But it’s not true.

After weeks of research and calling around to various women’s shelters and support groups on Indian reservations nationwide, we couldn’t find anyone who could substantiate what this statistic claimed. Mostly we heard things like, “That may be a problem off the reservation, but here, that’s not an issue. It’s usually someone from the community.”

With fewer than three million Native Americans nationwide and many of them living on tribal land, the 86 percent statistic began to seem very unlikely. It turned out I wasn’t the only one who had grown skeptical of this statistic.

South Dakota is home to nine Indian reservations and has one of the largest populations of Native Americans in the country. Former South Dakota Attorney General Larry Long was also perplexed. Based on his experience in South Dakota courts, the BJS data did not reflect the experience of the majority of Indian victims of sexual assault in his state.

Long commissioned a study to look into the validity of the BJS reports [PDF]. What he and his team found was that the BJS reports had failed to include federal case data in their research—an egregious error when you consider that the federal courts have jurisdiction over all cases considered “major crimes”—including sexual assault and rape—on Indian reservations in all but six states nationwide. This meant that the majority of crime data from sexual assault cases against Indian women (and information about who their perpetrators were) was not included in the BJS study.

In Long’s new study both federal and state crime data for South Dakota was included. The results indicated that Indian men were the perpetrators in 83 percent of sexual assault crimes against Indian women. At first, this statistic may also seem shocking, but it’s actually very similar to what you will find for all other racial groups in America. Across the board rape has always been predominantly an intra-racial crime.

And although Long’s study only deals with South Dakota, the omission of federal case data suggests that the BJS reports are flawed nationwide. This is a particularly frightening finding considering how many other studies that could inform policy someday have leaned on this questionable statistic.

So with the 86 percent stat debunked, we had to ask ourselves, “Is this a dead story? Should we move on?" But this is what I value the most about working with Vanguard—instead of dismissing the story, we said to ourselves, “OK, well this doesn’t change the fact that Indian women are being raped at a rate 2.5 times the national average. So let’s forget about trying to tell the story of 'who' and focus on how we can tell the story of why.”

Over the next seven months we learned that the answer to this question was a complex and often delicate mix of, poverty, social norms, under funding, federal negligence, legal complexities, and a history of violence that dates back to our nation’s earliest days. It wasn’t easy to untangle this web, to say the least. And even though the story looked nothing like it did when we set out, where it took us and what it says about the plight of indigenous women, made it an important journey and well worth it.

Watch the trailer for "Rape on the Reservation" after the jump, and tune in on Wednesday, June 2 at 10/9c to watch on Current TV.