
Sexual Abuse: Burden of Silence
Alaska has the highest rate of rape of any US state, and Native American women nationwide face sexual abuse at more than twice the national average, with one in three expected to experience it in her lifetime. This film travels into Alaska's Native communities to ask why the numbers are so high and why so many cases go unreported or unprosecuted. Survivors describe assaults that were never investigated, and advocates and tribal officials lay out the tangle of jurisdictional gaps between tribal, state, and federal authority that lets many perpetrators walk free, especially in remote villages far from any courthouse or police post. The film treats the abuse as a symptom of a wider pattern of isolation, poverty, and institutional neglect rather than an isolated crime wave, and lets the women most affected describe what silence has cost them. It is a short, direct look at a crisis largely absent from national news coverage, told through the people living inside it.