June 17, 2008 at 4:19 pm (Aboriginal affairs, Indigenous sovereignty, NT intervention, ageism, children, patriarchy, race and racism, sexual abuse, sexual violence, sexuality, state repression, the state)
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.
from ‘Intervention under legal attack’ Posted Mon Jun 16, 2008 9:40am AEST; Updated Mon Jun 16, 2008 10:24am AEST, ABC News
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.)
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December 10, 2007 at 9:50 pm (Aboriginal affairs, NT intervention, colonisation, race and racism, rape, sexual abuse, sexual violence, violence, whiteness, women of colour)
Answer: when it happens to Aboriginal women.
Recently Cairns District Court Judge Sarah Bradley sentenced nine men, aged between 14 and 26, who pleaded guilty to the rape of a 10-year-old girl, to probation. I.e. no conviction is being recorded for this offence, according to Judge Bradley’s judgement.
One of the men has a prior conviction for child sexual abuse. Despite this, the Crown Prosecutor did not ask for custodial sentences for the men.
[***EDIT: Correction-- No conviction is being recorded against the juvenile perpetrators, who are getting probation. The adult perpetrators will have suspended sentences with convictions recorded. Articles were a little ambiguous on that point.***]
The lenient sentence was justified on the basis that the girl apparently “was not forced and she probably agreed to have sex with all of [them].”
Many of them are from powerful families in Aurukun, the remote Cape York community in which the rape occurred; the girl is not. She has now been placed in foster care.
The Queensland Attorney-General Kerry Shine is planning to appeal the sentence, although the appeal period of 28 days has expired, and the state Premier Anna Bligh will review all sentences handed down in Cape York over the past two years.
More details:
The issue not being discussed in any of these reports is the whiteness of the judge who handed down the non-sentence. Why did she play havoc with the life of a young Aboriginal girl? Why is her life worth so little to this white judge? Why is she being kinder to rapists (black though they may be) than to young women? Isn’t it because Aboriginal women are considered worthless by the white legal system?
And why has this girl been removed from her family? In the Age article it suggests that the girl was initially placed in care in the Aurukun community.
I think Auntie Shirley said it best: for Aboriginal people, child removal equals paedophilia.
I think this case reveals the corruption and hypocrisy of Australian governments in dealing with child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities. While the state is enabling confessed abusers, it is also chastising the entire Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory with punitive welfare quarantines and paternalistic community managers. While Aboriginal leaders condemn the enabling of abuse and the malevolent neglect of governments, the state congratulates itself on taking military action. For eleven years John Howard let report upon report about abuse, poor health, inadequate housing, unemployment and poverty pile up and he did nothing but take a knife to the guts of Indigenous leadership and rights. And now all Aboriginal people get is their money quarantined and threats to roll it out to the entire country.
It looks like the ALP is tripping on whatever ideological sauce the Coalition was on. It’s the only way this kind of bullshit could possibly make any goddamn sense.
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