In 2007, the findings of the Little Children Are Sacred report shocked the Howard government into implementing its ‘Northern Territory National Emergency Response’, dubbed The Intervention. The left, of course, were outraged – but not in the way any decent person should have been. They not only furiously attacked the Intervention as ‘racist’, but flatly denied the crisis in child abuse in Aboriginal communities. The Australian Human Rights Commission claimed that there was no ‘endemic child abuse in NT remote communities’.
Just don’t believe your lyin’ eyes.
A five-year-old boy has allegedly been raped in a remote Northern Territory community this week, triggering calls for greater public disclosure of child sexual abuse in the jurisdiction, as one advocate claims half of the 20 remote communities she visited in 2024 had children as young as five exhibiting “harmful sexual behaviour”.
Multiple sources confirmed to The Australian that a 19-year-old male was arrested and charged following the alleged rape, which occurred at a small community in the northern part of the Territory, near the Gulf of Carpentaria, on Tuesday.
The most shocking thing about this is that is so dreadfully normal. Gang rapes of children, often by other children, are far too common in remote communities.
The case led child safety advocates to call for more information to be made public about serious sexual assaults on children to increase awareness of widespread child abuse in the Territory.
So, what is the government doing about it?
The charging of the 19-year-old came within hours of the Prime Minister’s fly-in, fly-out visit to Alice Springs to announce $843m in funding for the Territory.
The funding is set to be delivered over six years to strengthen the delivery of services in remote communities, including policing, women’s safety, alcohol harm reduction and “mediation and peacekeeping activities”.
‘Alcohol harm reduction’ – what a joke. It was Labor, don’t forget, who overturned ‘racist’ bans on alcohol in remote communities, ignoring the pleas of Aboriginal women’s groups. Child abuse prevention educator Holly-ann Martin rightly questions the government’s tokenistic ‘actions’.
“The government have just announced today all this money for the Northern Territory. There’s money for women, (but) where is the money for abuse prevention for children?”
In October 2023, Mr Albanese refused calls by the coalition for a royal commission into child sex abuse in indigenous communities, claiming the opposition was politicising the matter.
How, then, is Anthony Albanese any different from Catholic bishops who knew of abuse on their watch and hid it for expediency?
“They (politicians and senior police) just are covering it up,” Ms Martin said.
“We need to shine a light on it so we can protect children.
“If we keep saying ‘nothing to see here’, then children aren’t being protected.”
And as long as politicians are afraid to speak up against tribal ‘big men’, as long as the elite fawn uncritically over ‘culture’, it will keep going on.
A sacked member of the Northern Territory’s Northern Land Council and former reality star for a crocodile egg-hunting television show has been sentenced for serious child abuse and negligence offences, as well as sending a photo of his erect penis while on the toilet to two children as he tried to use drugs and cash to solicit a teenage girl.
Paul Henwood, a Muk Muk Marranunggu traditional owner who in 2019 pleaded to then indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion to be reinstated to the NLC, was last week sentenced to a non-parole period of three years and five months for the serious offending in which he also “exposed children to violence, sexual behaviour and drug paraphernalia”.
Meanwhile, Aboriginal communities and regions with significant Aboriginal populations continue to descend into violent anarchy.
Thanks, ‘world’s oldest living culture’!
