Melissa Hughes & Pip Hinman
On the May 15 edition of ABC TV's Lateline, Northern Territory Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers went public with reports of violence and abuse of children in NT communities. She cited cases that were "beyond most people's comprehension", including nine-year-old girls requiring treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
The corporate media went to town over these revelations of violence in Indigenous communities such as Waddeye and others in the NT. But Indigenous Australians have been speaking out for years about these problems, as well as other social problems that disproportionately affecting Indigenous people, wanting assistance in finding solutions.
The Productivity Commission's second Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage report, issued last year, paints a grim picture of life for Indigenous Australians (see < http://www.pc.gov.au/gsp/reports/indigenous/keyindicators2005/A href="mailto:index.html"><index.html>).
According to the report, on average, Aborigines die 17 years younger than other Australians. Indigenous students are half as likely to continue to year 12 as non-Indigenous students. Real gross weekly household income for Indigenous people is going down (in 2004 it was $374, whereas in 2002 it was $394). The hospital admission rate for intentional self-harm is on the rise among Indigenous people (increasing from 2.8 to 3.2 per 1000 people). Aborigines are more than 12 times as likely to be hospitalised for assault compared to non-Aborigines. The proportion of Aborigines who report being a victim of violence increased from 13% to 23% between 1994 and 2002.
The report also found that there had been no improvement in imprisonment rates between 2000 and 2004, with Indigenous women's imprisonment increasing by 25% and Indigenous men's by 11%.
Indigenous people are 11 times more likely than other Australians to be imprisoned. In 2003, Indigenous juveniles were 20 times more likely to be detained than other juveniles.
The rate of children on care and protection orders (for all states and territories except NSW) was five times higher for Indigenous children than for non-Indigenous children.
In 2002, nearly 40% of non-remote Indigenous people had used mind altering substances at some time in their lives, while 24% had used mind altering substances in the previous 12 months. The most common conditions for drug-related hospital admissions were mental and behavioural disorders, poisoning and accidental poisoning. Nationally in 2002, 28% of unemployed Indigenous people were long-term unemployed.
Judy Atkinson, professor of Indigenous studies at Southern Cross University, has been outspoken about inter-generational abuse, including publishing papers and a book Trauma Trails. She argues that previous abuse, poverty, unemployment, housing, alcoholism, pornography, boredom, policing, grief, broken families, separation from land, drugs, complacency towards violence and a lack of counselling contribute to the social problems facing Indigenous communities.
Atkinson's solution is to reduce violence through "education, education, education", and she wants $5.7 million for a three-year, three-state project, Building the Future, which she hopes will help communities break out of the "complex and worsening" cycle of violence.
Marcia Langton, an Indigenous academic at the University of Melbourne, believes that for years requests for help have been ignored. "Women have been screaming for police help for over 30 years. Is it ever going to happen, we wonder? Are there ever going to be police charges against rapists? Are the Aboriginal legal services who supposedly work for us going to ever stop arguing that rape is tribal law?"
In the 1990s, Queensland academic Boni Robertson detailed the problems of violence in Indigenous communities when she was part of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women's Taskforce Report. No action came from her report.
The "action" being considered by the federal government includes sending the army to "restore order" in the communities and removing alcohol. A national summit has also been called by Indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough. According to Warren Mundine, federal Labor Party president, these measures will do nothing to ameliorate the underlying troubles in remote communities.
Alice Springs elder Agnes Palmer says the combination of unemployment and alcohol, as well as substance abuse, are the causes of domestic violence. She also believes that part of the reason for the drug- and alcohol-related incidents is that Aboriginal people have been prevented from helping to find solutions. "People are angry that they have been shut out and have no say in what the government wants to do, and this leads them to all sorts of bad stuff."
Rosie Kunoth-Monk, an Alywarre woman and court interpreter, agrees. In an interview with the ABC's Indigenous current affairs program Living Black in February 2005, she emphasised the need for greater consultation with Aboriginal people as "the solutions ... have been put in by people with the best intentions, but most have been made without Aboriginal inclusion and have become part of the problem".
The solutions, Kunoth-Monk said, need to include tribal law, which is something that many parliamentarians, including the PM, have rejected. "It's a bit rich to say self-determination and traditional customary law have failed ... they have never been given a chance to work ... I expect if traditional customary law was able to fully work in some of these communities, the first bloke that assaulted a baby would have been thrown out of the tribe, quite probably with a spear stuck into him."
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 7, 2006.
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