Little Children are Sacred
From Envirowiki
The "Little Children Are Sacred" report from the Northern Territory's Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. The report was issued by a board of inquiry, chaired by Rex Wild and Patricia Anderson.
The issue has become very controversial, with the Howard government taking an election year swipe at "fixing" the issue. However, it would be hard to argue that the report itself is controversial - In all the hysteria about sending the army in and thinly veiled excuses to wrench sovereignty from Aboriginal people once again, the media usually neglects to mention the facts, and it seems that most media and politicians haven't actually read the report. The Authors of the report have actually riled against a number of the government's plans for remote indigenous communities, and a lot of social justice activists and academics see teh Howard Government's actions as little more than an attempt at a land grab, perhaps linked to uranium mining
[edit] The report
These are that sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities consists largely of:
- that perpetrated by non-Aboriginal people against Aboriginal kids, e.g: mining workers against young Aboriginal girls in a sex trade context;
- non-Aboriginal men sexually abusing Aboriginal kids in every day contexts e.g.: non-Aboriginal adult men working in jobs that bring them into contact with Aboriginal kids (like school bus drivers);
- Aboriginal kids doing it to each other, no doubt because it was perpetrated on them (see a) and b) above); and
- to the limited extent that it is done by Aboriginal men, it is when they are under the influence of alcohol or petrol sniffing (see report page 59 - 71).
The report also showed that the notion that sexual abuse is somehow a function of Aboriginal law (lore) is a deeply offensive load of crap. In relation to incest for example, the Report noted that incest is treated as an extremely serious breach of traditional law and punishable by death (report, page 61). It said "(a)s would be expected in any community, most of the Aboriginal men the Inquiry spoke with found the idea of child sexual abuse abhorrent and advocated severe, sometimes fatal, physical punishments for offenders" (page 57). Even where there were traditional arranged marriages, the inquiry didn't find sexual abuse occurring in that context (page 68): "although the relationship would be cultivated from an early age, the man was forbidden to have sexual contact with the girl until she was a woman" (page 69). The court cases that have wrongly been portrayed as showing the marriages legitimise sexual abuse are described on page 70.
Overall the inquiry found that the sexual abuse was "as all the inquiries before us and the experts in the field already knew -...whether in Aboriginal or so-called mainstream communities...often directly related to other breakdowns in society - the cumulative effects of poor health, alcohol, drug abuse, gambling, pornography, unemployment, poor education and housing and general disempowerment, lead(ing) inexorably to family and other violence and then on to sexual abuse of men and women and, finally, of children..."(page 5).
The sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities is nothing more or less disgusting than any other legacy of colonialism perpetrated on a first people, pure and simple, and like every other legacy of colonialism in this country, the blood is on we whitefellas' hands.
