Discrimination Against Aboriginals

The Discrimination Against Aboriginals

Research Paper

The discrimination against aboriginals has unfortunately been a part of Canadian society since we can remember. Even though the aboriginal peoples owned and inhabited these lands long before us, they are being discriminated against and Gerber’s (2014) research finds that aboriginals are found at the bottom in terms of level of education and income. This is not the only form of discrimination Aboriginals experience; the most discrimination occurs in schools and at work (Currie, Wild, Schopflocher, Laing & Veugelers 2012). Aboriginals can equally find themselves are at high risk of addictive behaviors such as gambling, which is caused by post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms after experiencing

The paper studies a hypothesis that aboriginals use the act gambling as a way to cope with the discrimination they have faced (Parlee et al., 2012). The sample that was studied consisted of 371 aboriginals and 80% of them experiencing discrimination, leaving the majority of them to suffer PTSD symptoms (Parlee et al., 2012). From the sample, 93% have gambled four or more times in the previous year (Parlee et al., 2012). 33% of the sample fell into the category of problem gamblers and 17% were considered as “at-risk” gamblers (Parlee et al., 2012). The likelihood of using gambling to escape a person’s negative emotions is measured by the avoidant/numbing subscale (Parlee et al., 2012). This subscale measures the degree to which an individual will make efforts to avoid their negative feelings, by turning to addictive behaviors (Parlee et al., 2012). After studying the sample, it was discovered that there was a 13% increase of gambling to escape for every discrimination situation (Parlee et al., 2012). It was concluded that there is in fact a correlation between discrimination and the increased use of gambling problems to cope with negative thoughts and feelings (Parlee et al.,