how can they be expected to treat their children any differently? What happened to those kids created a vicious cycle for the generations to come of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse and so on. Statistics Canada reported in 2014 that a higher number of aboriginal people reported experiencing some form of physical or sexual mistreatment before the age of 15, compared to that of non-aboriginals. (Kirkup) It’s difficult to get exact statistics because people are afraid to speak up, for a variety of reasons. Fear of any threatened consequences by the abuser, many aboriginal people live on reserve and those are very close knit communities so they may fear of creating a rift in one’s family. (Kirkup) So, many incidences of maltreatment remain shrouded in silence.
Everyone needs a
way to cope and
sometimes
people find
methods of
coping that are
fair from healthy.
Many residential
school survivors
turned to drinking
or drugs to cope
with the
memories of
their experiences and potentially their treatment of their family. Survivors of residential schools will go the rest of their lives experiencing the impact of their time spent there.
It was forced into their brains as kids that because they were native they were worthless and nobody told them any different, so that is how their view their own ethnicity. So, that’s what they distill in their kids. Many aboriginal teens turn to these same unhealthy habits because that’s how they were taught to cope with their problems. These method can manifest as; drug and alcohol abuse, chronic illness, and suicide. (Kirkup) In the First Nations