Dead certain. The indigenous domestic violence crisis

There is a crisis within the crisis that has been mentioned in Royal Commissions and Forensic Reports for decades. Subsequent governments ignored this. Andrew Brown continues her series on domestic violence.

Indigenous women make up just over 3% of Australia’s population. But they account for 62 percent of those hospitalized for domestic and domestic violence. Read this ratio slowly. Three percent of the population. 62 percent of those hospitalized. Indigenous women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalized due to violence than non-Indigenous women and six times more likely to die from violence.

In Central Australia, the hospitalization rate is 95 times higher.

These figures did not appear suddenly. These are the total weight of what this country has done and continues to do to First Nations people.

Before colonization, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities were self-governing. Their laws and kinship structures had been built over tens of thousands of years. Colonialism tore them apart. These were replaced by patriarchy, which deprived Aboriginal men of status and economic activity.

He handed the resulting trauma over to the same institutions that caused it.

Patrick Dodson has long argued that colonization systematically undermined the role and status of Aboriginal men, destroying the structures through which identity and family life were established. The dislocation did not disappear. It progressed through families and became what researchers call intergenerational trauma and communities simply call their reality.

Intergenerational trauma

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, colonization continues to take its toll. Dispossession, cultural displacement, alien gender hierarchies, and forced displacement of children have created traumas directly linked to rising rates of domestic violence. This is not an extreme academic position. It is documented by decades of investigations, court findings and royal commission testimony.

Yiman and Bundjalung woman Carlie Atkinson, co-founder We are Al-liput it directly. “Intergenerational trauma stems from the brutal conditions our elders live in,” he said. “Fear of separation from the country and society,

the colonization and oppression of our people and their subsequent denial.

The violence experienced in indigenous communities today is inseparable from the violence perpetrated by the state for generations. Addressing one without accepting the other is not a policy position. This is studied ignorance.

Professor Marcia Langton described what happened as “a sick situation, an unacceptable situation, a deeply perverse situation.” It does not describe a cultural pathology. It explains the consequences of what is done to culture.

Violence is not a product of Aboriginal identity. This is a product of what colonialism has done to identity, to men, to families, and to the structures that once held communities together.

institutionalized discrimination

Then there is the problem of institutions. The police, courts, child protection agencies and health services intended to ensure safety are institutions that many Aboriginal women have every reason to fear. The kidnapping of indigenous children in this country has been called the second Stolen Generation.

In Victoria, which leads the nation on gender-based violence, 2024 data showed one in ten Aboriginal children have been removed from their families. The national average is half that.

A woman who calls the police about violence in her home is not just reporting a crime. She risks the kidnapping of her children. This calculation is not unreasonable. This is the reality of what it has historically meant for Aboriginal families to seek government assistance. The system asks these women to trust institutions that have been trying to destroy them for generations.

Coroner Elisabeth Armitage’s inquest in November 2024 examined the deaths of four Aboriginal women: Kumarn Rubuntja, Kumanjayi Haywood, Miss Yunupingu and Ngeygo Ragurrk. Each of them had sought help. Each killer was known to the police.

Each was failed by the same system that their ancestors had every reason to fear.

There is also a cruelty in celebrating some legal reforms as progress. When New South Wales criminalized coercive control as a standalone offense in 2024, it was presented as a landmark step. But First Nations women were among the harshest critics.

They warned that the law would lead to increased incarceration, not protection, of Indigenous women. Laws that do not center Indigenous women will be used against Indigenous women by a system that has a long history.

Reply

The answers to this crisis already exist in the communities experiencing it. Antoinette Braybrook has led Djirra, Victoria’s Aboriginal family violence legal service, for more than two decades.

“Aboriginal women are not silent and have not remained silent,” she said in her 2023 National Reconciliation Week Address. “We have been silenced, disbelieved, and our lives not valued. Are you listening?” He is equally clear about what is holding back change: “Our voices, our solutions and our truth-telling have been ignored by successive governments and decision-makers. Meanwhile, governments and the systems that report to them continue to implement punitive and racist responses.”

Using cultural connection as a protective factor, programs such as Djirra’s Koori Women’s Place workshops and the Men Supporting Men program run by the Ebenezer Aboriginal Corporation are locally designed, community-controlled responses appropriate to the context in which they operate.

They are not pilots, they are proven models. Yet they

are chronically underfunded for the scale of the issue they are asked to address.

Federal Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCarthy carries the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Action Plan. It invested $13.995 million in 25 community-controlled organizations. This figure is not a commitment when the national domestic violence budget exceeds $4 billion and hospitalization rates exceed the national average by 34 times. It’s a gesture.

The Closing the Gap target is to reduce domestic violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children by 50% by 2031. Current data collection is insufficient to measure progress toward this goal. The government doesn’t know whether things are getting better or worse because it hasn’t developed the tools to find out. He set a deadline, announced it publicly, and never created the means to verify it.

Treating a crisis as a line item is similar to this. You’re only financing enough to claim that you’re financing. You set goals without measuring tools. You order reports and ignore them. “Words will not save women’s lives,” Braybrook said. “Action will be taken.”

There are names of women in the gap between announcement and reality. They are owed more than just a target.

Definitely Dead. Australia’s domestic violence system is on trial