Indigenous affairs: Violence against women rising as expertise ignored

Marcia Langton says violence against ­Indigenous women and children is escalating as those who understand the issue best are ignored and talked over.

Prominent Indigenous women who believe the Albanese government needs a permanent working group to advise on how to reduce violence and increase safety for victims.

Marcia Langton says violence against ­Indigenous women and children is escalating as those who understand the issue best are ignored and talked over.

Professor Langton – who has documented the extent and ­causes of family violence in Indigenous communities and written extensively on victims’ safety – is among prominent Indigenous women who believe the Albanese government needs a permanent working group to advise Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney and Women’s Minister Katy Gallagher specifically on how to reduce violence and increase safety for victims.

“Lives are being lost while people in the women’s safety sector dither about irrelevant issues,” she said.

Professor Langton said there was an urgent need for the government to take advice based on evidence, data, rigorous policy and legal reform after Northern Territory Supreme Court judge Judith Kelly spoke publicly about an epidemic of extreme violence trapping women in the nation’s far north.

Judge Kelly told The Weekend Australian the violence was brought about by inter­generational abuse and disadvantage and a culture that protected perpetrators before victims.

She said she wanted Australians to know what was happening to Aboriginal women and directly addressed The Australian’s three-part ­series on Ruby, an Indigenous woman who was sexually abused and beaten by her father in the ­remote community of Yuendumu and then forced to flee the town after he was jailed.

“When I read that, I was shocked by how shocked I wasn’t,” she said.

“It’s a horrendous story, but we see that every day.”

Marcia Langton says ‘the safety of women and children must be the overriding and first concern; not fear of increasing incarceration rates for Aboriginal men’. Picture: David Geraghty

Professor Langdon said: “The safety of women and children must be the overriding and first concern; not fear of increasing incarceration rates for Aboriginal men.

“There are many interventions that are required to prevent violence – for example, adequate emergency accommodation and frontline Indigenous family violence workers.”

Ms Burney plans to listen to Indigenous women on the topic of family violence at a summit to be chaired by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner June Oscar.

Dr Oscar is a Bunuba woman from the Fitzroy Valley who published the views of Indigenous women on a range of issues important to them in her 2020 Women’s Voices report, called Wiyi Yani Thangani.

“I know, and the government knows, that we need to do more as a country to combat the unconscionable level of violence against First Nations women,” Ms Burney told The Australian on Sunday. “We recognise the issues affecting First Nations women are multilayered. That’s why we’ll deliver a separate national plan for First Nations people to end ­violence against women and family violence.

“We will also conduct a National First Nations Women’s Summit, chaired by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, as the first step in responding to the landmark Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Women’s Voices) report.

“The key to success in this challenge, as it is across so many areas, is making sure we hear the voices of First Nations Australians, and empowering us to self-determination.

“That's what the voice to parliament is all about, and will be the touchstone for how I approach every issue as minister.”

While Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says the Labor government must prioritise the rights of Indigenous victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse ahead of establishing an Indigenous voice to parliament, Professor Langton sees the voice as central to practical solutions. “The voice is not symbolism. We are in this horrible mess of escalating violence because Indigenous people – especially women and youth – have no voice,” she said.

“There is a great urgency to fix this because we are spoken over – ignored, treated as mere undeserving clients – by apparatchiks who purport to know more than we do.”

Senator Nampijinpa Price, who lives in Alice Springs, said Labor must uphold the rights of Aboriginal children to be able to live lives free of dysfunction and violence. She questioned the Albanese’s government’s decision to end the cashless debit card for welfare recipients under 65.

“The Labor government needs to prioritise protecting the rights of victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse ahead of establishing a voice to parliament, the Uluru statement or treaty,” she said. “Any plan to remove the cashless debit card also needs to be ruled out, especially given that the NT Labor government are about to unleash floods of alcohol back out into remote Aboriginal communities.

“It’s not good enough to claim there is little evidence the cashless debit card is effective in order to end it and then claim a voice to parliament, which has not been tried or tested, will somehow fix all our problems.”

Senator Nampijinpa Price said the incarceration rates for perpetrators - and the victims who sometimes retaliated after repeated abuse - would reduce once the epidemic of violence was ­addressed.

“We can’t continue to rely on the voices of the elites as their ­efforts have not served to improve the lives of our most disadvantaged, despite the billions spent on their direction,” she said.