Once again the chattering classes are indulging in their intermittent pearl-clutching over dismaying rates of violence in Aboriginal communities. And, once again, no one dares mention the single most important fact: Aboriginal male violence and the traditional culture that encourages it.
The Northern Territory coroner has called for a significant funding boost to the domestic, family and sexual violence sector (DFSV) in the territory and announced she would hold a second major inquiry into the issue, after a landmark investigation into the deaths of four Aboriginal women […]
The coroner made 35 recommendations in total, broadly calling for a significant funding boost to the sector – including for frontline emergency service responses and women’s shelters.
What doesn’t get mentioned in those 35 recommendations? Aboriginal men or Aboriginal culture.
There’s no such delicate averting of eyes when it comes to the rest of Australia. Despite non-Aboriginal Australian women being safer than ever, among the safest in the world, we’re endlessly browbeaten that men and boys are incipient monsters. Yet, the same pearl-clutchers, who have no qualms prattling about an imaginary ‘patriarchy’ refuse to say anything about a brutally patriarchal culture that’s killing Aboriginal women at intolerable rates.
The violence of traditional Aboriginal culture is not a matter of dispute. Both archaeological and historical evidence bear ample witness to a culture whose brutality against women repeatedly shocked contemporary observers.
But, no, we’re expected to fawn over the supposed ‘World’s Oldest Living Culture’ – as if a literal Stone Age culture is anything to brag about – even if it means inventing the most fantastic lies about our own.
Despite finding “no clear evidence” that racism directly contributed to the deaths or systemic response to the deaths of each of the women, the coroner found that “racist attitudes and stereotypes” more broadly in the NT meant “violence against Indigenous women … was ‘minimised or dismissed’” because of an “attitude that violence against women is ‘an Aboriginal problem’”.
Which, as the statistics clearly show, it obviously is. But telling the truth is apparently ‘racist’, even if the coroner can cite no evidence. Only her ‘I just reckon’.
Oh, and the fact that there’s no interpreter services for languages almost no one speaks.
“I also find that there is evidence of clear structural racism within the NT’s Joint Emergency Services Call Centre [JESCC] in the form of the lack of availability of Aboriginal language speakers/interpreters,” Judge [Elisabeth Armitage] wrote.
She said more than 15 per cent of the NT population spoke an Aboriginal language at home.
“Imagine for a moment calling 000 in an emergency, knowing that the call will be answered by someone who does not speak your language and there is no interpreter,” Judge Armitage said.
“Do you make the call? And if you do, how will you communicate?”
How about by going to school and learning English?
She recommended Aboriginal interpreters and/or Aboriginal liaison officers be based in the call centre.
How many? When she says “an Aboriginal language”, she’s tacitly admitting that more than 100 languages are spoken in the Northern Territory alone. What she is advocating for is a make-work army of taxpayer-funded employees.
Anything rather than address the root cause of the problem.
