Our Featured Content for June is the Holoi ā nalo Wāhine ‘Ōiwi: Missing and Murdered Native Hawaiian Women and Girls Task Force Report (Part 1), a document that presents the scope of Native Hawaiian Women and Girls (NHWG) who are murdered and missing, and identifies possible solutions. This report was authored by Nikki Cristobal, Ph.D., and requested by the Hawaiʻi State Commission on the Status of Women and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs for the Missing and Murdered Native Hawaiian Women and Girls Task Force.
This report seeks to understand the violence against NHWG through the lens of historical trauma and current systemic inequities.
Here are some highlights from the report:
- Over a quarter of missing girls in Hawaiʻi are Native Hawaiian (pg. 5).
- The average profile of a missing child in Hawaiʻi is a 15-year-old female Native Hawaiian, missing from Oʻahu (pg. 5).
- Hawaiʻi ranks eighth in the nation with the highest rate of missing persons per capita (7.5 missing people per 100,00 residents (pg. 5).
- Data collection on Native Hawaiians is not uniform or streamlined and is often not disaggregated (pg. 18).
- Race data is collected inconsistently, leading to misclassifications of Native Hawaiians as a different race (pg. 18).
- Recommendations for improving data collection include utilizing qualitative research designs that center on the experiences of key experts such as lived experience survivors, social workers, and activists (pg. 18).
View the full report here.
