‘Plague of domestic violence’ takes lives of 87 women in NT

A landmark inquest into domestic violence in the NT has found that the horrific deaths of four Indigenous women at the hands of their partners were all preventable.

A NT coronial inquest investigated the killing of a 40-year-old Mirrangagu woman from the Manjungung clan, known for cultural reasons as Ngeygo Ragurrk.

In a landmark inquest into domestic, family and sexual violence in the Northern Territory, a coroner has found that the horrific deaths of four Indigenous women were all preventable, with urgent action needed to prevent a predicted 73 per cent rise in domestic violence over the next decade.

Coroner Elisabeth Armitage investigated the four killings and many others for more than a year, finding that at least 87 women had been killed by their partners in the NT over the past 24 years, almost all of them Aboriginal.

“The plague of domestic violence homicides that relentlessly courses through our community in the Northern Territory is our horror and our national shame,” Ms Armitage said.

The four “senseless and shocking killings” that formed the basis of the investigation were:

• Miss Yunupingu, 29, stabbed to death by her partner in October 2018.

• Ngeygo Ragurrk, 40, tortured to death by her partner at Darwin’s Mindil Beach in December 2019.

• Kumarn Rubuntja, 46, deliberately and repeatedly run over and left for dead by her partner in the carpark of the Alice Springs Hospital Emergency Department in January 2021.

• Kumanjayi Haywood, 34, burned to death after her partner set fire to the bathroom where she was hiding at a Town Camp outside Alice Springs.

Kumarn Rubuntja and Ngeygo Ragurrk, two of four Aboriginal women killed in domestic violence incidents whose deaths were examined in a landmark coronial inquest.

The inquests into the deaths of the four women were heard together because they raised similar issues: each had suffered years of domestic and family violence before their deaths, and had been engaged with frontline service providers during those years.

“Almost without exception, the man was intoxicated by alcohol at the time he killed his partner, usually to a very significant degree. Some were also under the influence of cannabis or petrol,” Ms Armitage found.

“These men killed these women because they did not like something about what the women were doing, and it made them very angry. They were angry because the woman wanted to make her own decision about where she would go or when, or what she would drink, or who she would talk to, or when she would speak or, in a handful of cases, because she said she wanted to leave the relationship.”

Up to seven or eight of every 10 women in the NT experience domestic, family or sexual violence, Ms Armitage found. In 2021, the rates of domestic and family violence-related assault in the NT were three times the national average, and five times that of most other jurisdictions where data is reported.

The rate of domestic and family violence-related homicide in the NT was seven times the national average, Ms Armitage said.

NT Coroner Elisabeth Armitage speaks with family members of Ngeygo Ragurrk during a ceremony at Mindil Beach, where on December 23 2019 she was killed by her partner Garsek Nawirridj. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

Aboriginal women in the NT were 40 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of family violence. More than 63 per cent of prisoners were on remand or in jail for DV-related offences. But even those statistics under-reported the prevalence of DV, Ms Armitage found, with less than 10 per cent of violence against women ever reported to police.

The scourge of domestic violence in the NT was becoming worse, she said. In the past 10 years, NT Police recorded a 117 per cent increase in the number of DV reports, and they predict a further 73 per cent jump during the next decade.

Ms Armitage recorded how hundreds of women in Alice Springs marched in July 2017 to raise awareness of domestic violence, among them town camp leader Kumarn Rubuntja, one of the founding leaders of the Tangentyere Women’s Family Safety Group. Just four years later, Kumarn became the 75th woman in the NT recorded to have been killed by her intimate partner since 2000.

Both Kumarn Rubuntja and Kumanjayi Haywood had sent messages to their loved ones in the hours before they died, telling them that they believed their partners were going to kill them.

Among the coroner’s 36 recommendations: establishment of a peak body for domestic, family and sexual violence and a significant funding boost for the sector, including greater employment by police of interpreters, alternatives to custody for perpetrators and a trial of Banned Drinker Register scanners in licensed premises to screen patrons.

“It is only the Northern Territory, which experiences the highest rates of domestic violence in the country, that does not have a peak body,” Ms Armitage said.