Save our Women!

“Would Indigenous women and children feel safer if constitutional recognition, or even a treaty, eventuated in Australia?” asks Hannah McGlade in ‘The Australian’.

And, in ‘The Monthly’, Marcia Langton voices the question that she believes most Australians will not ask: “is our legal system tolerating and even encouraging the femicide of Indigenous women?”

Both were discussing the utterly devastating level of violence against Indigenous women… and the overarching failure of both the justice system and state, territory and federal governments to protect these women and stem the flow of blood.

Langton cites four key contributing factors that fuel the violence: “While a range of factors including family violence, communication barriers, remoteness and economic disadvantage influence community safety outcomes, there are four significant drivers of crime within indigenous communities: drug and alcohol abuse, poor parenting, poor school retention and performance, and unemployment.” 

CASSE agrees with Langton and thinks there is also an additional underlying driver – intergenerational trauma – the crippling effect of which has been felt by every community. Drug and alcohol abuse, poor parenting, poor school retention and performance, unemployment, mental ill-health, violence and suicide are all legacies of  intergenerational trauma – from the time of invasion and the frontier wars, through the stolen generations and denial of culture, language and existence.

Intergenerational trauma underlies the triggers to violence in Aboriginal communities which experience the wounding legacies of colonialism to this day. Violent crime can be driven by a preceding guilt and by a FEAR for ONE’s OWN LIFE. Violent crime can enact the unspeakable. Violent crime can be about a haemorrhaging rage, bleeding pain and about inscripting SOMETHING, albeit bad, where otherwise there would be NOTHING… and certainly nothing good.  Trauma needs to be understood, thereby changing minds and saving lives.

Both Langton and McGlade noted there are areas where improvements are being made. Langton stating: “the programs that are working well to reduce incarceration rates go relatively unnoticed”; and McGlade referencing the success of The Northern Territory’s Sentenced to a Job program in “reducing recidivism rates among male ­Aboriginal prisoners who largely serve sentences for “acts intended to cause injury””.