1/ Better, more appropriate and just more housing so that children have their own room with a door. At least a girls room and a boys room.

It should be noted that many perpetraters of child abuse are children themselves, often family. My guess this is more the case than adult predation.

The drunken people should be sleeping well away from where the children are sleeping, preferably a different building.

2/ Take the focus of funding and program design in areas of domestic violence and child abuse away from the women and empower the men to deal with it.

Most perpetrators are men, it is mens business. The women cannot change the behaviours and value systems of the men, the best they can do is provide institutional protection such as shelters which are bandaids after the fact. The violence needs to stop, not be compensated for or accomodated.

3/ Acknowledge and empower customary law so that communities can deal with their own problems rather than going the police and courts path which takes years, is traumatic for the victim and convictions are very hard to achieve. Families are torn asunder when the experience could actually strengthen and unite them if done properly.

1,2,3 is obviously simplistic and incomplete, but unless there is a major change of direction of the present failing strategies and paradims, nothing will change. A Boosting of status-quo paradigms such as the NT intervention only reinforces the structural dysfunction.

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If a nice, clean white pedophile molested a child then their would be less detectible evidence without STIs. Also nice clean white families keep secrets better as children are isolated in nuclear families.

It is clear that Howard and Brough have tried to convince everyone that Aborigines are bad people who mistreat their children, just like Muslims who throw their children off boats. There is a real and definite attempt to demonise Aboriginal people, in particular Aboriginal men.

A natural empathy and concern for women and children and the reality of family violence is being used to whip up fear and hatred, not solutions.

This hysterical demonising and its knee jerk policies are not designed to do anything about child abuse but to simply look like they are doing something in a spectacular way.

All of the people who cry and call for urgent action will continue to cry and call for urgent action when the “Emergency Intervention” has been well established.

There has been no explaination anywhere, in particular in the parliament, as to how or why this plan is going to work.

We are told over and over again about how determined the government is, but I challenge anyone to explain how life in Aboriginal communities is better now than before the emergency intervention. I similarly challenge anyone to point at just one bright point on the horizon that might have a faint chance of achieving something out of this plan.

I do not dismiss the urgency. This plan is a very expensive and time consuming distraction from getting on with the specific solutions being demanded by every Aboriginal community in the country about their own situations. If urgency is an issue we should immediately disregard the Howard/Brough plan.

p.s. I am an Irish man in a Qld. Aboriginal family. This is no detatched observation.

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I’m sorry I just don’t have time to respond to everyone’s comments here, so I will just reiterate my concern for the need to explore and debate the **underlying** constitutional & historical conditions that allow the Commonwealth government to dismantle any territory laws (such as the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, which Howard is on record as saying he would repeal back in 1983), and take control. Quite simply put, I believe the ‘moral panic’ we are having would not exist if the NT was a state.

I also urge more complex, critical and, most importantly, well researched debate on the blogs (esp. Pipingshrike & S0metim3s) in regard to the history and nature of Commonwealth/Territory relations and the history of the entire issue of government responses to Aboriginal social conditions. This debate is much more than simply those ‘for Howard’ and those ‘against Howard’. There are shades of grey and alternate voices (for example, why not find out what Aboriginal people on these communities want?) but these are not being heard because of the polemical Left/Right stance which many bloggers are taking. This issue has a long, complex and very particular history which deserve far more space than they have been given space at present.

However, that is really all I can say because I have a deadline looming! Sorry guys.

Cheers
Rebecca

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In the time available, the Inquiry has preferred to concentrate on what is perceived to be the real task – prevention of sexual abuse, rather than a historical cataloguing and statistical analysis of precise incidents (p27).

This is unacceptable. To claim that there is systematic widespread child abuse is a serious charge. It requires a serious response and the first step is to substantiate that charge. Conclusive statistical evidence must be collated that the problem exists before a course o action can be proposed, if not least because of the distress such false claims will cause indigenous parents. It is simply not good enough to rely on suppositions and speculation over which there is not agreement even among experts (such as the relation between STIs and child abuse, see comments by Professor David Wells and Dr Angela Williams) before acting.

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For instance, evidence of prostitution by minors and adolescents having sex is not the same thing as child sexual abuse. It may well be involved, as background or motivation. But one can only really address prostitution (of any age) by addressing issues of poverty. Adolescent sex continues to be the subject of debate between those who would seek to minimise harm (availability of contraception, condoms, support, etc) and those who advocate abstinence. And so on.

In the latter case of the age at which young people are sexually active, the comparison the report makes between ‘the general Australian population’ and indig communities is misleading – and lends itself to racialisations. Because there are suburbs within this apparently unitary non-indig population where the age at which children begin to have sex is in fact the same as that which the report gives the impression only obtains in indig communities.

But, that said, I’m interested in how or whether the Nganampa Health Study you note factors in the overall higher rate of STIs, such that comparisons are indeed accurate. Aside from, as you say, not explaining how those children contracted STIs, I’m wondering how STIs function as a comparative index of anything unless the overall different rates of STI are factored in somehow. I mean, it strikes me that the absence of STIs in children who _have_ been abused merely points to the fact that the perpetrator did not have an STI.

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I was indeed referring to the pages of the report I quoted above (238 & 239) in relation to the matter of higher rates of incidence of STIs in remote Aboriginal communites in Northern Australia.

Perhaps I misinterpreted a comment of yours above about ‘no higher rates of sexual abuse’ to mean ‘no higher rates of STIs’. My apologies if this is case. I am familiar with a number of other clinical studies reporting that very young children in significant numbers contracting STIs at much higher rates (i.e. the Nganampa Health Study (1996)gives a figure of 105 times the average in non-indigenous populations). Unfortunately, as I suspect you are trying to point out, most clinical studies do not explain how STIs are contracted by babies, toddlers and very small children, and some STIs can certainly be contracted via non-sexual contact. This leaves us to fall back on reporting rates for sexual abuse, which are clearly a matter of shame for many people (regardless of indigeniety) and are not reliable indicators of the extent (or not) of abuse – which Anderson & Wild point out.

As I said in my reply to Kerim, I am more concerned that people here were not referring to clinical studies or primary evidence in dismissing well-documented health problems, just to each other’s opinion pieces.

Personally, I am interested in seeing a much stronger debate on the relationship of the Commonwealth to the Territory which permits the Federal government to do almost anything they like in the NT. This certainly has outcomes for Aboriginal people, one of which is the current topic of debate on this blog.

Anyway that’s enough from me. Now back to the thesis!

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An excerpt from Carolyn Cocca’s “From ‘Welfare Queen’ to ‘Exploited Teen’: Welfare Dependency, Statutory Rape, and Moral Panic” (NWSA Journal, 14:2, 2002):
[…] the construction of an “epidemic” of …

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The relevant part of the report reads, in part:

_On the basis of the available data, NT sexual health
practitioners have developed the view that sexual activity:
• in a person under 12 years is highly likely to indicate abuse
• in a person aged 12-13 years is a “grey area” requiring close examination of the situation
• in a person 14 years or older is often consensual
in nature, but may still indicate abuse (additional
information from DHCS, received 28 August 2006)._

According to this, then, what distinguishes child sexual abuse from sexual activity is age.

Before this, the report notes:

_In the general Australian population, 26% of Year 10 students (15-16 years) and 48% of Year 12 students (17- 18 years) were sexually experienced (i.e. had had sexual intercourse). In the West Australian Aboriginal Child Health Survey (2002), 33% of 15-year-olds, 44% 16-year-olds and 74% of 17-year-olds had had sexual intercourse. Having had sexual intercourse was independently associated with having left school, drinking alcohol and using marijuana at least weekly (Blair, Zubrick & Cox 2005). While no comparable NT data is available, there is an impression among many sexual health and primary care practitioners in the NT that young Aboriginal people in remote communities are beginning sexual activity earlier than their urban and non-Aboriginal peers (additional information from DHCS, received 28 August 2006), as is evident from data on young mothers and sexually transmitted diseases._

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I was not commenting on the criticism of the government raised by the blogs above -this is another issue altogether with its own serious moral, legal and historical issues. I am criticising the poor scholarship shown by some commentators in this and other blogs, seeking to deny the existence of very well documented social problems in order to criticise the government (and one blogger in particular above), rather than criticising the government on account of, for example, not consulting Aboriginal people on what would be the more appropriate steps to take to address these problems.

There are several other issues I would like to see all readers of this blog debate in a serious manner:

1. The history of Commonwealth & Northern Territory political relations and their influence upon present issue

2. The academic and cultural divide between those living in South-east Australia and those living in the NT. An offshoot of this -I have written in this forum on this subject before- is the divide in Australia between applied and academic anthropology

3. The issue of blog content being taken as scholarship or fact.

cheers

Rebecca

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The issue is dealt with in Anderson & Wild on pgs.238 & 239. They also make the following conclusion drawn from detailed clinical and social health studies:

On the basis of the available data, NT sexual health
practitioners have developed the view that sexual activity:

• in a person under 12 years is highly likely to
indicate abuse

If one investigates the studies on which they’ve based their conclusions, it is very hard to draw anything other than the same conclusion about the higher prevalence of sexual abuse in some -certainly not all- NT Aboriginal communities. The empirical evidence from clinical studies clearly supports the claims made by Anderson & Wild.

I strongly caution against a dismissive attitude to what is a serious social, moral, and legal matter, given the weight of empirical, clinical evidence available. This is not mere ‘extrapolation’ as one person on this forum has put it, based upon the blogged opinion of another, it is documented extensively within a literature that many commenting on these matters appear to have not bothered to consult.

There are a significant number of clinical studies regarding these matters. Here are just two examples:

FJ Bowden, BA Paterson, J Mein, J Savage, CK Fairley, SM Garland and SN Tabrizi (1999).Estimating the prevalence of Trichomonas vaginalis, Chlamydia trachomatis, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and human papillomavirus infection in indigenous women in northern Australia.Sexually Transmitted Infections, Vol 75, Issue 6: 431-434

Kildea S, Bowden FJ. (2000).Reproductive health, infertility and sexually transmitted infections in indigenous women in a remote community in the Northern Territory. Aust N Z J Public Health. 24(4):382-6.

This leads me to another point. Several commentators here, indeed, the entire original post on the Savage Minds website, appears to be based upon observations from within the ‘tabloid media’ and the blogs of others. This raises another issue: that of being able to credibly deny or confirm the existence of such a ‘crisis’ without first-hand experience, expertise, knowledge of the literature, and understanding of the socio-historical context inwhich the claims for and against are based.

From my investigations, some of the bloggers commenting on this topic do not appear to have a great deal of academic or employment-related background in Aboriginal communities. They are bloggers who network intensely with each other, and are largely interested in applying post-colonial critiques to a very diverse, complex and highly contextual situation. There is nothing wrong with that, however, they must be willing to verify their claims against previous studies, and accept that the literature does not support their claims, or state that their arguments are based ‘opinion’ rather than any detailed knowledge of or experience of the situation.

This is belied by an apparent unfamiliarity with the literature documenting serious problems in remote Aboriginal health and socio-economic outcomes, and the crisis of such in Aboriginal communities which has arisen over several decades. I politely refer them to CAEPR’s (Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research) work on this as a beginning point.

Lastly, I recommend Peter Sutton’s excellent commentary on this issue from a number of years ago.

http://www.abc.net.au/rural/events/ruralhealth/2005/papers/diseasepolitics.pdf

Readers should note that there is a response from Cowlishaw to Sutton’s paper and, a further reply to Cowlishaw’s critique from Sutton as well, but these aren’t as readly available.

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