Aboriginal violence has a lengthy history in Australia

Rosemary Neill:

THE case of the indigenous petrol sniffer who anally raped and drowned a six-year-old girl is one of the most depraved crimes I've heard of. This and other cases of child and infant rape were brought to public attention this week by Alice Springs Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers in a courageous attempt to jolt the public out of its complacency.

Rogers has succeeded, if the Howard Government's calls for an emergency summit, more police in remote communities and the flurry of headlines are anything to go by.

But it is naive and wrong to imply that the epidemic of child sex abuse in remote communities is new. This is what the ABC - which broadcast Rogers's remarks - has suggested.

This week, a headline on its website proclaimed "Culture of violence revealed in central Australia", while a Lateline reporter claimed that "the truth about homicide and child sexual assault is known to very few people in the Northern Territory".

Really?

Last year, a widely publicised NT inquest into the deaths of three petrol sniffers was told of Aboriginal children as young as four suffering from sexually transmitted diseases. It was also told that some residents of Mutitjulu, a black community that sits in the shadow of Uluru, were too scared to take a shower in case they were raped.

In the same year, a health conference in Alice Springs discussed how one-third of 13-year-old Aboriginal girls in the territory were infected with chlamydia and gonorrhoea.

Across the border in Queensland, a 1999 report into indigenous violence talked of child abuse in "epidemic proportions" and injuries resembling "reports from war zones". This report - by a gutsy taskforce of indigenous women - described how a three-year-old Aboriginal girl was sexually assaulted by four males. Two were juveniles.

Pretending the issue is new only obscures the culture of neglect, indifference and political correctness - by governments, indigenous agencies and the legal system - that has permitted the indigenous family violence catastrophe to fester for years.

During the past decade or so some media outlets, including this newspaper, have campaigned against violence and child abuse in indigenous communities, but most have managed, at best, sporadic coverage.

This self-censorship is not as pronounced as it once was, but a fear of being too negative about indigenous Australians persists, and the implications are disturbing. For instance, anti-domestic violence activist Jane Lloyd told the ABC this week that hospital workers in Alice Springs were instructed not to report to police violence-related injuries unless the patients asked them to. Talk about encouraging a culture of denial.

I first reported on the epidemic of indigenous family violence in 1994. My article mentioned how a senior politician remained unmoved when told that an Aboriginal girl had contracted four sexually transmitted diseases. She was seven.

For the most part, the code of silence remained unbroken until the mid-1990s, as politicians, feminists, white progressives and indigenous organisations turned a blind eye.

Why? Many conservatives were indifferent and saw black-on-black violence and abuse as "just the Aboriginal way". Progressives stayed mute because they feared reinforcing negative stereotypes. They thought they were being culturally sensitive. How sensitive is it to tacitly endorse a code of silence that allows infant rape to go unpunished?

It's time we recognised that witnesses and victims are doubly violated when we ask them to speak up publicly and governments, Aboriginal leaders and the courts do nothing, or next to nothing, to deter the perpetrators. Absurdly lenient sentences, often influenced by arguments about cultural difference, serve to further diminish the victims.

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