ButtUgly: Main_blogentry_150506

Australian aboriginal children abuse

When you can't sleep on a business trip, you watch TV. Channelsurfing, I ended up watching the ABC Lateline program. And now I most certainly can't sleep.

It appears that for a long time, there have been constant sexual abuses of children, down to the age of seven months in Australian aboriginal communities, where violence is common, there is no police, and a strong culture of silence which is very punitive: If you go to court and tell your story, the accused person's family will exert physical violence on you, for getting that person into trouble.

These are not isolated and anecdotal cases. Crown prosecutor Dr. Nanette Rogers in Alice Springs has released a paper detailing these atrocities, and was interviewed for TV.

(Quotes from the transcript; RealMedia and Windows Media also available. You may not want to read or listen.)

TONY JONES: Let's go to another case. In 2003 there was perhaps even a worse case. It involved a much younger baby - seven-months-old. Can you tell us about that?

NANETTE ROGERS: That was in a remote community. The child or the baby was asleep with other adults in a room in the house. The offender came along and removed the sleeping baby and was in the process of taking it outside the house. One of the adult women woke up and took the baby back and put it back into bed with her and they went back to sleep. Unbeknownst to the sleeping adults, he came back again and removed the child. A man in the house was - saw someone on the verandah at some point, he went out, and he found the offender with this baby and the baby was naked from the waist down. He didn't know anything untoward had happened. He persuaded the man to relinquish the baby because it was cold and all the rest of it. So the offender relinquished the baby after some talking and the man then put it back inside and they went to sleep. In the morning, the mother of the baby - she'd been drinking, she was still drunk - she came back to the house. She changed the clothes of the baby. There was blood on the clothing. The mother then went - left the house.

TONY JONES: She didn't notice? Is the evidence, in fact, that she was too drunk to realise what had happened to her own baby?

NANETTE ROGERS: That's one way of looking at it. The...when the mother left the house, one of the other adult women went and got the child, changed the baby's nappy, noticed the blood and so on and that baby, the seven-month-old baby and the two-year-old both required surgery for external and internal injuries under general anaesthetic.

TONY JONES: There are other cases. One of them is almost too depraved to talk about, but one feels you have to, in a way, get these things out in the open. But this is of an 18-year-old petrol sniffer who actually drowns a young girl while he's raping her?

and later on, about the aboriginal culture:

NANETTE ROGERS: That was a matter involving a young girl, aged about 14, who had some schooling in Darwin. She was at Yarralin, which is in the Victoria River Downs district and she was promised to a much older man. He came and took her - to take her physically and her grandmother instead - and the young girl didn't want to go. Instead of supporting her, her grandmother basically forced her into the car and assisted the older promised man in removing her physically from the community, where he then had sexual intercourse with her and kept her for a number of days at his outstation. And she's an example of - she was not complicit. She did not want to go. She - you know, it's that kind of new breed of young women hopefully coming through who see the choices that they've got and also, importantly, see the choices that non-Indigenous young women have in the broader society.

The Australian past is shameful, and the current situation is not too good either.