This seems impossible to believe.

I don't normally comment on news stories on which I have no special knowledge but the story seems so appalling that I am going to share it here. I gathered this from an article from The New York Times:

• One in three American Indian women have been raped or have experienced an attempted rape, according to the Justice Department. 
• Their rate of sexual assault is more than twice the national average.
• Alaska Natives are 15 percent of that state’s population, but constitute 61 percent of its victims of sexual assault.
• According a survey by the Alaska Federation of Natives, the rate of sexual violence in rural villages like Emmonak is as much as 12 times the national rate.
• Nationwide, an arrest is made in just 13 percent of the sexual assaults reported by American Indian women, according to the Justice Department, compared with 35 percent for black women and 32 percent for whites.
• The Justice Department did not prosecute 65 percent of the rape cases on Indian reservations in 2011.
• The White House proposed reauthorization of the landmark Violence Against Women Act of 1994 .
• A Senate version, passed with broad bipartisan support, would grant new powers to tribal courts to prosecute non-Indians suspected of sexually assaulting their Indian spouses or domestic partners. 
• House Republicans, and some Senate Republicans, oppose the provision as a dangerous expansion of the tribal courts’ authority.
• It was excluded from the version that the House passed last Wednesday.

Who are the House Republicans protecting, the whites who are sexually assaulting their Indian partners or the assaulted women?