Can Humanitarian Principles Work Inside a Domestic Death Investigation?
Author: Tara Luther, Promega with the assistance of AI
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Editor's note: Participants in the underlying study were each asked how they wished to be identified. Most chose to be named by name, title, and institution; a few asked to appear only by professional role. Both are reflected here as each participant preferred.
Seven times higher. Ten percent of the missing persons population. Seventy-two percent of them under eighteen.
Those are three of the figures a new study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences uses to size up the scale of the crisis facing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2+) in Canada and the United States: the ratio of the Indigenous homicide rate to the non-Indigenous rate in Canada, the share of Canada's missing persons cases that involve Indigenous people, and the share of the more than 5,000 Indigenous women and girls reported missing in the United States in 2025 who were minors. The study opens with a line its authors never answer for the reader: “How many family calls for justice will it take to change the death investigative system?”
Indigenous families in both countries have said for years, in national inquiries and public testimony, that investigations into their missing and murdered loved ones are handled inadequately, citing investigator bias, poor communication, and neglect at every stage from case intake to victim services. Canada's National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls issued its Calls for Justice in 2019. The United States didn't form its first federal task force on Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives until that same year, and gave it only two years to address thousands of cases. Both governments have acknowledged the crisis. Neither, according to the advocates the study cites, has closed the gap between acknowledgment and actual investigative practice.
Two Systems, One Question
Researchers Steff King of Simon Fraser University and Sabine U. Stratton of Kwantlen Polytechnic University, alongside co-author Gail S. Anderson, also of Simon Fraser University, set out to test a narrower, more specific question than whether the system needs to change: could Humanitarian Forensic Action (HFA), the framework the International Committee of the Red Cross uses to guide identification work after armed conflict, natural disaster, and forced disappearance, actually function inside a Canadian or U.S. medico-legal investigation without compromising judicial standards? Over an 11-month period, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews and surveys, offered in English, French, and Spanish, with 26 professionals who had worked in both worlds: forensic anthropologists, archaeologists, odontologists, geneticists, and pathologists, alongside medico-legal unit managers, disaster mortuary response team members, psycho-social experts, and international human rights legal advisors.
Their combined field experience spans Australia, Bosnia, Colombia, Cyprus, Ecuador, Guatemala, Kenya, Kosovo, South Africa, Somaliland, Ukraine, and the former Yugoslavia, alongside domestic medico-legal roles at home in Canada or the United States. Nine participants returned for a follow-up interview months later to weigh in on themes that had emerged from the rest of the group. Data was analyzed using inductive thematic coding, meaning the researchers let the categories emerge from what participants actually said rather than testing a theory they had already settled on.
The professionals agreed almost universally on the study's first, foundational question: yes, humanitarian principles can apply inside forensic medico-legal work. But several were careful to draw a real distinction between the two systems rather than collapsing them into one. One forensic anthropologist and international policy developer objected to the field's own terminology, calling the phrase “Humanitarian Forensics” misleading “because it supposes that normal forensic science isn't humanitarian.” Stephen Fonseca, Head of the ICRC African Centre for Medicolegal Systems, framed the relationship between the two mandates directly: “We fully acknowledge that the medico-legal system is supporting both the judicial processes, because it's providing evidence to support prosecutions, [and] it's meeting the public expectation of information to be shared with them as to what happened… but it can all be done showing compassion and humanitarian [principles] throughout the process. Being humanitarian doesn't impede any part of this but rather actually contributes to all of this because it shows the community that throughout this investigation you had the family and the community's best interests at heart and that the outcome of this investigation is for the family and the community as a group of victims.”
Community Engagement
The first and most repeated theme was community engagement, and Fonseca supplied the line participants kept coming back to: “your success is 20% technical and 80% family engagement, or public engagement, or community engagement. It's about relationships. Relationships solve cases.” In practice, that meant early, transparent conversations with families about what's being tested, why, and what happens to samples afterward. Forensic anthropologist Dr. A. Meyer described it as a way of directly reducing trauma: “Explaining to communities/families why specific procedures are done, how they will help in the investigation, what will be done with samples, for example, ... are all things that may mitigate some of the trauma and provides a transparency that fosters trust and respect.”
Several participants described specific accommodations they had made in the field: designating space near a scene for ceremony or prayer, allowing sacred medicines to travel with a body, or using a blessed shroud to cover remains in a morgue. Forensic anthropologist Dr. Melissa Connor drew the boundary line other participants kept returning to. Accommodating a family's wish to conduct a ritual, even to “kill a chicken before opening a grave, pour whiskey on the grave, or shake sage around the area,” does not interfere with the investigation, in her view, and the investigator should simply accommodate it. But, in her own words, “if they wish to keep grave goods or a bone prior to documentation, that does interfere with the process, and the investigator needs to make that clear.”
One Latin American forensic anthropologist described the underlying idea in terms that went beyond procedure entirely. Posthumous dignity, in her words, is not only about how a body is treated, but about the close relationship between the living and the dead, the perception of death, and the rituals and symbolic thinking that accompany it, all of it expressed “in the duty of the living and the rights of the dead.”
Reaffirming the Living
The second theme reframes who an investigation is actually serving. Participants observed that missing and unidentified people are disproportionately drawn from communities that are already underserved, in life and in death, and noted that Indigenous families in Canada and the United States have described their loved ones being treated as “less than worthy victims.” Forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Pollanen connected that pattern to resourcing broadly, rather than to any one institution: “Most people who are missing or unidentified are among the most vulnerable people in society. Therefore, failure to identify these people widens the gap between those with and without resources, much to the detriment of society in general.”
Participants were adamant that families are victims in their own right, not bystanders to a case being built around someone else's loss, and several connected that principle to a training gap rather than a character flaw. One psycho-social anthropologist, describing a pattern they have observed across several countries, put it this way: “We need to train police on how to be more sensitive on the issue of missing families of missing persons because generally the police treat the families as if it's their fault. Or that there's a criminal element to it. Which is not the case for so many.” The recommendation that followed from that observation, echoed by several participants, was proactive rather than corrective: building disaster preparedness plans with specific communities before a crisis occurs, establishing trusted relationships around the collection of genetic reference material, and training community members on the basics of forensic science and death investigation, so trust doesn't have to be built for the first time in the middle of one.
When the Political Will Isn't There
The third theme was the most pragmatic: what participants do when political and institutional will for reform moves slower than a family needs it to. Participants described this as a pattern they have encountered in many countries, not one specific to Canada or the United States, and several were careful to frame it as a resourcing and prioritization problem rather than a question of anyone's intentions. Rather than waiting for political will to shift, participants pointed to tools that already exist and don't require new legislation to invoke. ICRC legal advisor Vaughn Rossouw laid out the legal grounding directly: families, and any citizens, “have the right to information,” and underneath that, “the right to know the fate of their deceased family members,” a standard that holds regardless of a government's capacity or timeline to act on it. Others pointed to the United Nations' Minnesota Protocol on the investigation of potentially unlawful deaths as a baseline any jurisdiction can measure itself against. Forensic archaeologist Dr. Derek Congram framed it as a standard worth reaching for, not just meeting: “if Canada is not complying with at least the conditions of the Minnesota protocols, we've got a problem because they should be doing better than that. They could have a higher standard.”
Some participants described relying on mediaries, community-investigator liaisons with backgrounds in psychology or cultural anthropology, to help bridge gaps between families and institutions when consensus was hard to reach. Forensic doctor Dr. Mulamba Igulu Adolphe described their function simply: to bring together the ideas and collaboration of everyone involved, and to reassure the community enough to move past mistrust and doubt. Others emphasized that the strongest version of this work happens well before an investigation starts, through relationship-building, disaster preparedness planning, and community training, rather than trying to earn trust for the first time during a crisis. As Megan Bassendale, founder and CEO of Forensic Guardians International, put it, understanding what a community actually needs takes real listening, since “oftentimes what the families want, what the politicians want, are not the same.” Reaching consensus in those moments, Dr. Derek Congram added, “requires thoughtful negotiation amongst stakeholders to try and reach a reasonable consensus, which is not always possible.”
Not a Single Story
Across all three themes, participants pushed back on the idea that humanitarian and criminal justice goals are fundamentally in tension. One forensic odontologist summarized the distinction this way: community-based investigations prioritize dignity, family needs, and cultural respect, while criminal justice investigations prioritize evidence, accountability, and legal process. “Ideally, a balanced investigation should integrate both perspectives,” in the odontologist's words, not by softening the science, but by making sure it never loses sight of the deceased's humanity or what the living still need answered.
That balance isn't automatic, and Dr. Pollanen was careful not to oversimplify it. “There is a necessary firewall between the two activities to protect the integrity and unique mandate” of humanitarian and international criminal justice work, he noted. But families of the missing want both: identification of the dead, and real knowledge of what happened to their loved ones, including accountability for it. As scholar Rosenblatt has written, and the study's authors cite directly, real-world humanitarianism is “a series of questions, not an answer,” about power, sovereignty, and which lives and deaths a system decides matter enough to resolve.
The study is careful not to overstate its own contribution. Its 26 participants are not a substitute for what Indigenous communities and advocates have already been recommending directly, in national reports and public testimony, for years. What the study adds is narrower and more specific: professionals with direct, first-hand experience in both humanitarian and domestic systems, on the record, saying the two are not as incompatible as institutional practice has assumed. As the authors put it in their own closing words, “the hope is that it may benefit at least one family who has been long impacted by the MMIWG2+ crisis.”
References
Source: King S, Stratton SU, Anderson GS. Applying humanitarian principles within forensic medico-legal investigations to better support families impacted by the MMIWG2+ crisis. Journal of Forensic Sciences. 2026;00:1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.70414