Young Northern Territory lives lost to ‘sorry business’

Communities along Australia’s northern coastline are facing an epidemic of child suicide and self-harm.

Communities along Australia’s northern coastline, home to some of the world’s most intact Aboriginal cultures, are caught in an epidemic of child suicide and self-harm that has claimed at least 50 young lives over the past decade in the Northern Territory alone.

Almost 60 per cent of the children believed to have killed themselves in the Territory since 2010 did so in outback areas of the Top End, home to just 20 per cent of people in the same age group, according to leaked figures obtained by The Weekend Australian.

Forty-two — or 84 per cent — of the deaths were of Aboriginal people despite them constituting just one-third of all Territorians. The eight non-Aboriginal children included Jayne “Dolly” Everett.

Almost half of the 50 deaths were in near-coastal remote communities admired for their rich cultural life and relative seclusion from mainstream society.

Twenty-two of those were in places along a stretch of pristine shores and dry savanna forest reaching from the Tiwi Islands near Darwin to Borroloola in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria.

Lily Roy, a grandmother with about 30 direct descendants and many more youngsters in her family tree, comes from one of those communities. Two of the children who suicided were her family, as was an adult who died recently.

“I can’t understand why they suicided,” Ms Roy said. “Perhaps they were worried about family ­issues or boyfriends and girlfriends … in the early days, there were no drugs.” The loss of a child was utterly devastating for those left behind. “We hurt ourselves with knives or billycans. It’s part of our culture, part of our sorry business,” Ms Roy said.

Separate official data released earlier this week showed the youth suicide rate among under-25s in the Territory was ­almost four times the national average and up 82 per cent ­between 2009 and 2017.

The Weekend Australian’s figures suggest the suicide rate among outback Top End children — excluding young adults, who ­national data suggest suicide at significantly higher rates than under-18s — may exceed the Territory’s shocking average rate for under-25s.

An official precis of several of the deaths highlighted relationship woes, substance abuse, bullying and poor school attendance. It also recorded traditional parents vying to keep wayward offspring away from harmful influences. Family conflict involving young or “wrong skin” traditional partnerships appeared relatively common.

The youngest recorded victim was a 10-year-old boy; the average age of death was just over 15.

Eddie Mulholland, the chief executive of Arnhem Land-based Miwatj Health, likened trying to battle suicide in isolation to “beating your head against a tree all day long”.

“Where you have people that are disadvantaged, poor and don’t have control over their lives, you are going to have mental health ­issues,” he said. “It’s not the individuals that are the problem; it’s the circumstances that they’re ­living in — that’s what people have to understand.”

Outside constructs imposed on traditional societies had left ­people feeling powerless and unable to cope, he said. Arnhem Land residents needed better avenues to appreciate the benefits and challenges of the modern world at their own pace.

When the death of a 10-year-old girl in Western Australia’s Kimberley region in 2016 exposed a cluster of 13 youth suicides, state Coroner Ros Fogliani called a joint inquest to address why, after several such inquiries, suicide rates were not in decline. Territory Coroner Greg Cavanagh followed up last month with his own joint inquest into the deaths of three teenage Aboriginal girls, Fionica Yarranganlagi James, Keturah Cheralyn Mamarika and Layla “Gulum” Leering.

All of them had been sexually molested, and all met with tragic ends that might have been ­avoided had services worked differently.

The grandfather of one of the girls who repeatedly caught sexually-transmitted infections while underage demanded to know why authorities failed to investigate “who had assaulted her” and ­accused them of treating his granddaughter “like an adult”.

Mr Cavanagh will return next week with a further inquest into the deaths of three more youngsters, all believed to have been involved in substance abuse and all with links to the Top End region most affected by child suicide.

Rowena Cox, who lives in the Kimberley town of Halls Creek, lost her son to suicide in 2012. “It was a real blow to me as a parent, as a mother, losing my child,” she said.

“I thought to myself, ‘Why did this happen? Why didn’t I see the signs?’ I wasn’t aware of the issues he was going through.”

Ms Cox could recall at least 10 youth suicides in her extended family network. Recent efforts to combat suicide in the Kimberley had been beneficial. But Ms Cox warned that the underlying issues like domestic violence and substance abuse remained rife.

A new study out last month identified child abuse and neglect as “consistently the leading behavioural risk factor” contributing to suicide and self-harm in Australia, accounting for about 35,000 “lost” years of healthy life in 2015 alone.

The same work — a compilation of suicide and self-harm data by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare — highlighted a spike in reported incidences of self-harm, particularly among teenage Indigenous girls.

Jacqueline McGowan-Jones, the chief executive of Thirrili, which is involved with the federally funded National Indigenous Postvention Service in the Territory, said there was evidence a number of recent suicide victims had suffered “sexual trauma”.

“That may be rape by someone that they thought was a boyfriend, rather than through child sexual abuse,” she said. “What we do know is that support services are nowhere near as available for ­remote communities as they are for the urban population.”

A government source knowledgeable about child deaths worried about young girls becoming trapped in environments where reporting abuse could spark family drama and potentially make them less safe than they would be by tolerating it in silence.

There should be a concerted effort to support youths and communities willing to confront pernicious social problems, they said, emphasising the need to expose uncomfortable truths often shrouded from view.

“Suicide is clearly a massive issue, and bringing attention to it is in everyone’s interest,” they said.

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