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 abuse is often hard to gather and difficult to sustain over time. Clearly, it was not easy for this witness to come forward, and certainly not made any easier by the premature death of the accused. What played out was more than a community watching the police taking another one of its members to court. The case showed how difficult it can become for families and communities to engage in issues that threaten the very fabric of their already fragile and largely powerless society. This is quite apart from the difficulty of engaging and healing the hurt and pain of those who were assaulted and abused, the most vulnerable ones of all.
I observed that, as the police moved in and charges were laid, family and community members backed off. They did not engage in public discussion, ring up lawyers, talk to the media or even call a community meeting. They retreated back to those whom they could hold onto and trust, their own families.
This movement away from public conversation and scrutiny may have happened because desert people have experienced a long, and often painful, history of public scrutiny and negative judgement by other Australians. A critical ingredient of that history is their relationship with the police. When the desert people of this region, the parents and grandparents of the today’s adults, first met missionaries they also met police. At this first encounter sheep belonging to the missionaries were speared. Police were called and men were taken away in chains. And that was at the first encounter! The Kukatja word for police became wayirnuwatji, ‘the one who comes with chains’, the description of a relationship that was to be remembered for future generations.
Not surprisingly, family members today remember not just those early days but many times since, when police have intervened to take members of their families away. Police have used violence against young and older desert men in the past decade. Rarely was there accountability, explanation or communication with local leaders or families. Sometimes, desert people have accepted these actions, sometimes they have resented them. Often they have felt angry, frustrated and powerless.
What can be confidently stated is that over several decades a strong and sustaining relationship of trust between the police and this group of desert people has not developed. Hence, when police, Government officials or others come into Aboriginal communities and people experience their words and actions as ones of admonition, correction and criticism many simply walk away. They turn to those whom they can believe are the only ones they can trust, namely the members of their close and immediate families. This applies equally to all those who have experienced violence and abuse, and those who have been charged.
As this Government exercise develops, the experience of trust between all involved is central. When people experience being shamed and blamed, their trust in themselves and those criticising them can easily be further eroded. When those who have been deeply hurt and assaulted are not offered the patience and strength of trust, their wound of mistrust can deepen and follow them into adult life. And, within this desert context, trust holds particularly important meanings for people who have learned through painful experience not to trust the police, not to trust Government initiatives and interventions, and not to trust those who continue to highlight their failings.
The constant flow of Government bureaucrats through communities over decades, not to mention the constant change of policies over the same period of time, has left most Aboriginal people living a poverty that is hard for urban Australians to appreciate. Trust, however, remains a key ingredient, a cultural ‘glue’, that holds these families and often very artificially constructed ‘communities’ together.
Trust is what holds desert people and sustains them when there is no money, no roof over their heads, when the Centrelink or CDEP money doesn’t come and the store is closed. This is a trust that causes people to rely on each other, to know that within a changing and dominating non-Aboriginal world their family remains. Trust lies behind the ceremonies that men and women perform, particularly initiation and mortuary rites, and people’s ability, despite language and other differences, to come together and celebrate important moments of their individual and communal lives. This is a trust that enables each ‘family’ to experience regular support and care, as wide networks are fostered and sustained
In cases of child abuse, the trust that a child places in adults, families, and community has been seriously broken. The abuse of a child is, in many ways, an abuse of the whole society. It reflects a trust that has been broken and that cannot be simply fixed or quickly restored, no matter how well intentioned are those who intervene.
Hence, when the Government seeks to develop policy on the run, as it clearly did in this case, it shows that it has not carefully considered, or appreciated, the needs of those who are most affected by violence and abuse. It shows it does not understand how previous policies have eroded the trust of desert people who live a long way away from those Government officials who continue to make decisions about their lives. It shows, most tragically, how people in communities might choose to tolerate further violence and abuse when faced with options that do not strengthen trust but erode it.
It would be easy to respond to the Government’s actions by showing that it has cared very little for the rights and needs of children in the past: Aboriginal, refugees or asylum seekers. It would also be easy to remember the barrage of constant and negative comments that Government ministers, including the Prime Minister, have made about Aboriginal communities, their culture and human rights in recent years.
It will be less easy to witness these initiatives, and their long-term implications, and also to believe that people and communities might experience further abuse and violence. Serious questions remain. What of those who will be charged? What do we know of them and how they learned this behaviour? Who will work with them to ensure they do not offend again? And what of those who are the most vulnerable in all of this, namely those who have been abused and their close family members? How will they learn to trust those who now seek to intervene quite intimately in their lives? When trust has been damaged over many decades how can it be restored? Can it ever be restored by focussing on the children without attention to the parents and grandparents of all those involved? Have we forgotten that it is families who grow up children and communities who grow up families?
At a seminar in Melbourne more than thirty years ago, Professor W.E.H Stanner commented on the poor state of Aboriginal health. He noted that not much had improved over the preceding four decades. On children he commented,
"The reason why we established some settlements was that we thought it gave us the best chance of working on the children. We supposed that we could do little or nothing for the adults. We would be vindicated by what we could do for the children. When we had succeeded with the children, the settlements would wither away within a generation or two. That idea, which is older than Macquarie, has wrought havoc in Aboriginal life. It has never worked and never will work as long as parents care for children and children look to parents. This desperate fallacy has been held right through Australian history".
Stanner, respected for his profound insights and reflections around Aboriginal life, pointed to a fundamental issue that has plagued our nation’s history. Government has rarely worked well with Aboriginal adults nor shown that it wanted to communicate and work with them. Instead, it has sought to focus on the children: to remove, educate and immunise them. As a nation we have failed, too often, to work with their parents and grandparents and their wider family networks. We have rarely committed ourselves to support their strengths and capabilities. This recent intervention highlights this tendency.
Where in this present situation are the procedures in place that will support family structures, when trust has been broken, when more men are in prison and communities continue to live in poverty? Where is the support for those Aboriginal men and women who maintain, with great dignity and hope, their families and communities? Where are the networks and programs to help those young men who have learned damaging and violent forms of behaviour? Where is the trust that can repair the damage caused by pain and violence?
There are key Aboriginal leaders, men and women, who have earned trust far beyond that reciprocated by their immediate families and relations. There are also some police who have earned trust, as there are teachers, lawyers, ministers, sporting coaches and youth workers. The number may not be great, as many non-Aboriginal people rarely stay long enough, or enter deeply enough, into the life of remote communities to gain that trust. However, the building of trust begins here, within communities and in partnership with key Aboriginal leaders, women and men. Outsiders, police and others, can make use of this trust. They may seek to listen to, be guided by and work with the trust, however fragile, that exists. If they seek to believe they can work without trust, their actions will simply fail.
One of the lessons we have learned in western society is that the damage caused by sexual abuse can continue for decades and be transmitted to future generations. If we are serious in addressing this issue, we need to address how those who have been most hurt are helped. At the moment there seems to be little understanding of how this might occur. As I sit and listen with those whose lives have been radically affected by recent Government actions and police initiatives, I sense that people will continue to do what they have done for decades. They will turn to those they believe they can trust.