For some weeks now I have been witnessing the members of a remote Aboriginal community address a most delicate issue: child sexual abuse. The location and name of the community are not important. Neither are the details of the case. What is important is how this experience can inform us in relation to the recent intervention of the Federal Government in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. As a sudden and unexpected move to engage those who are most likely the most vulnerable people in Aboriginal communities, it needs to move with much more than speed.
Care, sensitivity and wisdom are required, and the government must show that it has learned from the earlier experiences of government interventions over recent years. The government also needs to show that we can trust in the years to come that those who were abused will receive appropriate healing, those who have been violent have been fairly punished and offered rehabilitation, and that the families of both have become stronger rather than more hurt and broken.
For some time I have wanted to believe there were agencies, private and Government, State and Federal, which might enter with some purpose and commitment and address a whole range of abuse, violence, neglect and poverty that has plagued remote Aboriginal communities for years. I will continue to hope that such interventions will occur and will make a long-term difference. However, I have serious misgivings about the present interventions. I also have serious misgivings about a conversation that reduces complex issues to a simple absolute: ‘the child must come first’.
In the community where I was present, after months of conversations involving the police, a child protection officer and community members, a man was charged with committing the offence of sexual assault against a young girl. He went to court but, before a verdict could be reached, he died. In the course of his court appearances, and after his unexpected (and unrelated to the alleged offence) death, some of the family of the deceased turned against his accusers. It is not only non-Aboriginal families who find it difficult to believe that one of their own members could abuse anyone, much less someone whom they know as ‘family’ in that wider and extended Aboriginal meaning of the term.
In this case, as in similar cases, police only managed to lay charges because a witness came forward. Evidence in cases of child