And a peak legal body representing Indigenous Territorians says the intervention has had the unintended consequence of prosecuting teenagers for having sex with each other.
Helen Wodak from the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency says a year on from the release of the Little Children Are Sacred report, its teenagers who are being targetted.
“We expected to see an increase in people being charged for sex offences with children and that’s not what we’ve seen. We’ve seen an increase in teenagers being prosecuted for having sex with other teenagers.”
Ms Wodak says the intervention has unevenly targetted Indigenous teenagers, but not other teens who are also having sex.
She says it may be a matter of racial discrimination.
When we say the intervention is “paternalistic” I think it literally refers to an authoritarian parental kind of control to which Aboriginal people — young and old — are supposed to respond with filial loyalty. And if you want to frame it in terms of the heterosexual nuclear family, then the framing of colonial state authority as “paternal” subtly invokes the gendering of community authority as “maternal”… which indeed a lot of community authority is, in the sense of being in the control of women.
I.e. the message is: mothers can’t take care of their children (blame women for men’s sexual abuse of children); children can’t take care of themselves (Aboriginal children are sexually irresponsible); Aboriginal men have failed in their patriarchal duties to protect women and children (and aren’t ‘real men’); Daddy State must step in and take a firm hand with them all. It’s a dynamic which repeats itself all over colonial regimes: disruption of familial (especially women’s) authority by an overarching colonial state patriarchy.
But what do young people (and I mean kids under the age of eighteen) have to say about the intervention? What must it feel like to live in an environment where your sexual decisions are ascribed either to depravity being visited upon you from outside, or your own internalised depravity? Where there is nothing to empower you to make sexual decisions for yourself?
If we frame (all) child abuse as an act of ageism — an effect of a political system which disenfranchises children and young people, which deprives them of the ability to make sexual decisions for themselves, which deprives them of a voice to speak about their sexuality (including abuses thereof) — then responses to child abuse which constrain children must also be viewed as abusive and ageist.
So why isn’t criminalising Aboriginal adolescents for having sex viewed as a form of sexual abuse of children? (A question which is based on a statement I made: you cannot combat sexual abuse of children by instituting a system of racial abuse.)
Sophie said,
June 18, 2008 at 12:30 am
I hate to leave such a prosaic comment, but I thought you might not have noticed that the “8 )” (eight bracket) has turned into a smiley face.
Anyway, great post, especially the “If the government is the father that makes all other “authority figures” the mother” idea which I hadn’t encountered before.
Jennifer said,
June 18, 2008 at 6:56 am
child abuse as an act of ageism — an effect of a political system which disenfranchises children and young people, which deprives them of the ability to make sexual decisions for themselves, which deprives them of a voice to speak about their sexuality (including abuses thereof)
Slightly peripheral to your main topic there, but yeah. I’ve been thinking about that for a while - the way that child abuse is facilitated by/ rooted in how children are routinely disempowered in other ways and seen as less than fully human until they reach adulthood. But hadn’t seen it framed in quite the words you used - disenfranchisement/deprivation. Thanks for the description.