Mick Dodson stood up at the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday and gave one of the most important speeches you'll hear in Australia this year, or any year.

Violence and black children in Australia

While the extent of violence in Aboriginal communities has long been known and lamented, Dr Dodson's speech is the most unflinching and confronting recognition of the extent of the problem we have heard from an Aboriginal leader. Just as important, rather than pinning the blame on non-Aboriginal Australians, Dr Dodson cited a range of causes for the epidemic of violence that has shattered Aboriginal families and communities. He sees that the solution can only come through practical partnerships, not feel-good symbolic rituals designed to stroke middle-class white consciences.

Dr Dodson's speech made harrowing listening. He spoke of patterns of violence so entrenched in Aboriginal communities that child victims of violence become perpetrators themselves before they reach adulthood. He said Aboriginal women experience violence at a rate that is 45 times that for non-Aboriginal women. And worst of all, he spoke of violence against children that "includes neglect, incest, assault by adult carers, pedophilia, and rape of infants by youths".

While Aboriginal people are, as Prime Minister John Howard has acknowledged, the most systemically disadvantaged group in the community, Aboriginal children are the most vulnerable members of that group. As reported in The Australian today, the West Australian Government is setting up an inquiry into the high level of child deaths in the state – Aboriginal children in Western Australia die at three times the rate of white kids. On Tuesday night, the West Australian parliament was told that in the notorious Swan Valley Nyungar Community camp in Perth, there is not a single female virgin aged older than 10, and that 60 per cent of boys are regularly sodomised.

Dr Dodson points out that violence of this sort has no basis in Aboriginal traditions, and has been created out of a corrosive mix of poverty, social exclusion and alcohol abuse. While he praised self-help programs like night patrols and therapy camps, he called for more support for such pro grams from the Government. Until this is tackled, all other programs to redress Aboriginal disadvantage are undermined by the violence. Importantly, Dr Dodson acknowledged that the times when non-indigenous Australians were not allowed to speak out on this problem were gone. While the picture Dr Dodson painted was horrifying in every respect, his speech did show that at least one ingredient, without which Aboriginal domestic and community violence can never be solved, is finally in evidence – leadership.

12 June 2003

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,6581366%255E7583,00.html

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