EDITORIAL: Time to take responsibility for protecting women from domestic violence

It’s time we faced up to the disproportionate rate of Indigenous women who are falling victim to the scourge of domestic violence every day in the Territory.

JUSTICE Judith Kelly’s decision to open her courtroom to the media’s cameras on Friday was the act of a woman who has seen more gendered violence from her seat at the bench than most of us would care to imagine actually goes on behind closed Territory doors.

In ordering the latest thug to have ended his intimate partner’s life to spend the rest of his own behind bars, Justice Kelly laid out the shameful statistics that reveal the true scale of devastation wrought by domestic abusers.

Territory prisons are filled with Aboriginal men, about half of them there for violence offences and of those, about 80 per cent directed that violence against their supposed loved ones.

While there are many factors that lead to the over incarceration of Indigenous Australians, Justice Kelly pointed out that those men also represent “a steady stream of Aboriginal women going to hospital, or like this poor woman, to the morgue”.

Justice Judith Kelly took the extraordinary step of inviting cameras into the court for the sentencing of Samuel Edwards who was convicted by a jury of murdering his domestic partner. Picture: Julianne Osborne

Domestic violence is not an Aboriginal problem, it is, as Justice Kelly says, “everybody’s business”.

So it’s time we faced up to the disproportionate rate of Indigenous women who are falling victim to its scourge every day in the Territory.

The grim statistics prove simply blaming individual perpetrators and locking up more black men is no solution. It’s time we took responsibility as a society as a whole to protect these women from this tidal wave of harm.

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