A big problem

Town at the coalface in fear of overflow | Indigenous Welfare | The Australian

The mayor of the Northern Territory town of Katherine notes this:

Ms Shepherd points out that part of the problems of her town ironically stem from existing alcohol bans in the dry Aboriginal communities around Katherine, ranging from 50km to 600km away. With Katherine their regional hub, Aborigines come in for shopping and medical services, and many buy grog they can't get in dry communities.

Some don't make it back.

"At any time we can have 300 or more visitors from Aboriginal communities sleeping in doorways and drains, many severely affected by alcohol," Ms Shepherd said.

There is a town camp owned by the Territory Government and leased to an Aboriginal-run community organisation, but it's a dangerous hell-hole with tension between those who live there permanently and visitors from other clans.

"It has not been properly managed in the past, and although the current manager is doing his best, it needs to be safe for temporary residents," Ms Shepherd said, adding that she worried for the children there.

When Ms Shepherd visited a camp called Geyulkan yesterday, there was no one sober enough to string together more than a sentence.

It certainly is a big and complicated problem that Howard is taking on.

As to the issue of how much change needs to take place in consultation with the communities, isn't the fundamental problem that it's difficult to identify those residents who have the authority to bind the communities? As many people point out, aboriginal women have been asking for change for years, but what authority are they perceived to have by the rest of their community? Same with male tribal elders. If in a community a significant number of them have an alcohol problem, or a history of being a sexual abuser themselves, are they excluded from consultation?

So, while many are complaining that a more authoritarian approach is unlikely to succeed, my suspicion is that this fundamental practical difficulty of the consultative approach has been downplayed for years.

One of the more surprising sections in the Report was this:

The Inquiry found that at many community meetings, both men and women expressed a keen desire to be better informed about what constituted child s-xual abuse and the health, social and legal responses to it. However, people did not want to be talked at. They wanted to be able to enter into a dialogue in their own language through which they could develop this understanding, with information, assistance, support and time being given by the relevant agency to facilitate this process of learning.

Well, this is an area where I think most people should rightly react along the lines: "forget cultural sensitivities when it comes to knowing what is child (or even adult) sexual abuse. They just need to be told in English (or if they don't understand that, their own language) a few key points: incest is illegal at whatever age; sex between adults and children is illegal. Sex without consent is always illegal too, no matter what age. No one who has an STD should have sex with anyone until it's cured. "

The basic rules just aren't all that complicated, surely.

The main grey area may be about consensual sex between unrelated teenagers below the age of consent, as indeed it is within the white community too. But that's probably the least of our worries anyway when it comes to abuse in these communities.