The Australian Institute of Family Studies has estimated that up to 90 per cent of sexual abuse in these communities is under-reported. A police operation in the Pilbara identified that many people did not report child abuse because they believed child sex abuse was part of Aboriginal culture and that teenage pregnancy was a norm. The facilitation of contraceptive implants in girls as young as 11 or 12 when requested by a parent or guardian resident in these communities or recommended by a health worker is not uncommon. "Men are having sex with children, young girls, young boys ... It's a tragic situation because the children lie awake at night, waiting for it to happen to them, just lie there, waiting. They know it's coming for them, because it’s happened to everybody." - quote from Pam Greer, Aboriginal activist in the area of Aboriginal family violence, 2007 It is estimated that about one in four girls is subject to abuse, and one in nine boys. Reality of Aboriginal child abuse far worse | The West Australian The crown prosecutor for central Australia, Nanette Rogers, in a report exposed widespread rape and violent death in Aboriginal camps. She said Aboriginal children, including babies as young as seven months, were being raped by community members, with these crimes often going unreported and few cases reaching trial. She cited an example from 2003 where a man raped a seven-month-old baby girl whom he had taken from a room of sleeping adults. In the morning, the baby's mother noticed blood on her clothes but was too drunk to register what had happened. Another case, a two-year-old girl who required surgery after being sexually abused by a young man. Her mother and father had been drunk at the time of the assault. A 12-year-old girl who was taken from her community, tied to a tree for several weeks and repeatedly raped. She eventually became pregnant and gave birth. Report reveals abuse epidemic in Aboriginal communities (irishtimes.com) Child sexual abuse is widespread in Australia's Aboriginal communities where a "river of grog" (alcohol) is destroying indigenous society, leaving children vulnerable to sexual abuse, said a government-sanctioned report. Australia’s 460,000 Aborigines make up about 2 percent of the country’s 20 million population. They are consistently the nation’s most disadvantaged group, with far higher rates of unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, and domestic violence. Aboriginal child sex abuse widespread in Australia | Reuters
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08...gap-strategy-addressed-in-pm-speech/100348748 We know - What do YOU want us to do about it? Steal the children?
Many of our indigenous are still dealing with the traumas of “The Stolen Generation” so been there done that - failed spectacularly
Yeah, must be worse than some of those other traumas those children experienced in stories in the links.
So the solution is steal the next generation? What does grievance have to do with victimizing children? What kind of person would try and excuse that
People excusing bad behavior is precisely why it continues. Thinking you can't hold people accountable for such despicable crimes because they belong to an underprivileged class is exactly why the problem won't be solved
I disagree. That sounds like a harsh conservative approach. If you held these people to the same standards as they do to white Australians, probably 1 out of 9 of the adults will be hauled off to prison, and many of the children would have to be put into special camps too, so it would just be a repeat of "the stolen generation" all over again. Maybe they all have to be treated like children. Some social workers up there say the problem is so bad the government should institute a prohibition against alcohol and the aborigines can't be trusted with alcohol. That alone would probably cut the abuse rates by more than half. Others have suggested maybe some of this abuse just has to be tolerated to a certain extent and only the worst type of offenders put in prison.
I do not think it's conservative in the least to hold a child's molester responsible for their crimes it is the bare minimum acceptable threshold. So certain races are allowed to commit certain crimes in your country? No wonder there's a problem.
Do you think white people should decide what's best for the aboriginal community, or do you think it should be left up to the aboriginal community to decide what's best for them? Do we have a moral right to intervene on behalf of vulnerable innocent victims and impose our values on another community? When exactly do we have this right? They're going to try to solve the problem in their own way, but maybe their way won't seem acceptable or good enough to us.
So it's a case of "Well, that's just how THOSE people are, nothing to see here...oh, time for tea!". Sounds like they're "deciding what's best for them" as hard as they can. This post is an example why liberals can't get things done in situations like this, they're so agonized on seeing "all sides" they can't actually land on one. If the "aboriginal community" were eating their children (which they're essentially doing) would you still be wringing your hands over the "morality" of intervening?
They have been which is why it hasn’t worked and why this next wave of funding is different. To be honest there is not a lot of difference in the socio-economic profiles between Canadian Inuit American Indian and Indigenous Australian. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/t...use-facing-native-american-kids-883449df0f63/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3708004/ https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/artic...t_responding_to_sexual_abuse_pauktuutit_says/ So, the Australian Government is going to try again and hopefully this time we might succeed. All we can do is keep trying.
These are some of the worst examples. But yes it's a problem. As bowerbird pointed out indigenous people's go off the rails for a while when exposed to/exploited by western culture. Indigenous peoples have a deep, intrinsic and profound connection with the land and when this bond is severed it's like ripping the soul out. Hard to function after that.
public schools did a lot to end child abuse, homeschooling often means no one to tell if there is abuse
And your post is an example of why Christian nations felt duty-bound to enslave native peoples, to bring them civilized religion. IOW, your post demonstrates an invariable, narrow way of seeing all of the world's situations. I was just in a thread about Dem strategists, deciding to blame VP Kamala Harris's lack of popularity, on misogynist media bias. The thread creator (ShadowX?) noted that, to a hammer, every problem is, "a nail." This describes the hammerine perspective of your own post, here. Let me first say that, your first impression, that THIS IS ALL PERVERSE CHILD ABUSE, MAY BE CORRECT. But I do not know enough about Australian aboriginal culture, to be able to suggest a course of action. Certainly, I would agree that the horrendous examples, given in the OP, of the sexual abuse of mere infants, & the kidnapping, mistreatment, & brutal rape of anyone, requires remedial action. I can also remember, however, hearing of a traditional culture, in Africa, in which the "norm," was for adults to instruct children in sexual practices. According to that documentary's makers (presumably quoting the verdict of both anthropologists & psychologists), this was not forced, was accepted by the children, as well as the adults, and resulted in their growing, themselves, into happy, well-adjusted members of that tribe. Please do not extrapolate from that, the oversimplification that, if all the adults agree to be perverse, this excuses it. I realize what a potentially slippery-slope this is, to which I refer. I am disgusted & outraged, for example, by these practices, as carried out by certain Latter-Day Saints communities. But, even in that LDS culture, the female children who are exploited, do not typically have any choice in the matter, and many experience this traumatically. I realize that I am probably wasting my breath to even suggest this, but it is possible for some cultures to have different values than our own without, automatically, their being evil, or even, "wrong." The practices of that African tribe, strike me as similar to that of Bonobos, a primate that is an equally-close relative of human beings as chimpanzees. As shocking and unacceptable as it seems to our, modern perspective, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Australian, aboriginal mores could differ from our own, & not be necessarily detrimental to the children. Again I am NOT STATING THAT THIS IS THE TRUTH, IN THIS CASE. Nor, under ANY circumstances, would I condone the things cited in the OP. I am merely open to the idea that the bizarre stories, from the OP, are perhaps not representational of the norm, but exceptionally sensational cases. If that were the case, there might be other behaviors that are being all lumped together, which do not deserve to be. My suggestion is not that no decision could ever be arrived upon, as you charge about "liberals (BTW, @kazenatsu certainly does not fit that description)". I simply believe in educating oneself about a thing, before arriving at conclusions. IOW, just because something flies in the face of our own sense of propriety, is not always sufficient, IMO, to render judgement on a culture, about which we are completely ignorant. But if YOU have an intimate understanding of this culture, that renders my comments moot.
It's a very sad story. But I just read your Reuters article, which seems to paint the potential for a very hopeful ending. It said that these problems drop off dramatically, when alcohol is not sold, or strictly limited. Why did you not quote any of that more optimistic material, kaz? What do you know of the alcohol link, Bowerbird & Melb_muser? From that article, it sounds like turning off the booze spigot would make a hugely-positive difference, and quickly. Is there any chance the Australian govt. would do that? Has it been discussed? Or is the Reuters article, quoting the government report, inaccurate on that point? <SNIP> Instead, the report laid the blame squarely on a culture of alcohol abuse in the Northern Territory. “Extreme alcohol abuse has become normal in the Northern Territory and the devastating effects on children are rapidly increasing,” said the report. “The lives of Aboriginal children are more important than the right to drink.” DEATH EVERY 38 HOURS Alcohol causes the death of an Aborigine every 38 hours, with a quarter of the deaths in the Northern Territory. In 2004-05, 21,863 people were taken into police protective custody in the territory. Between 2001 and 2004, there were 2,000 assaults and 110 sexual assaults per year due to alcohol. The report said alcohol abuse increased the likelihood that someone would sexually abuse a child, meant children were forgotten by drunken parents and became more vulnerable to abuse. and was used to buy child sex. “Alcohol is being used as a bartering tool to gain sex from children, either by offering it to the children themselves or in some cases to adult members of their family,” it said. One Aboriginal woman from the Yolngu tribe said “white man’s water is a curse” and called for alcohol outlets to be closed. “Eradicate this curse that is killing us physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually,” she wrote in a letter published in the report. The report said banning alcohol sales in some Aboriginal communities had dramatically reduced sexual abuse and violence. Before the two hotels near the Borroloola community lost their liquor licence in 2006, Aborigines were drinking eight pallets of full-strength beer a day or 8,640 liters of beer. Now restricted to low-alcohol beer from a nearby store, Aborigines consume two pallets of beer a day and crime has plummeted. There was no annual Christmas riot because many hard-core drinkers had left town, said the report.
Morals change over time. Most of us probably have an underage bride in our family trees closer than we would like to admit. Part of it was the lack of birth control + poverty made marrying off daughters ASAP an economic necessity and perhaps a way of increasing the chances some of their family survived. Not defending it. Just pointing out that life and history are a bit messy.
If only the aborigines were held to the sane, moral laws that everyone else in society must follow, then this problem wouldn't have gotten out of control. It warms my heart to know that such laws really do matter! My faith in humanity is restored. Now, as for the rampant sexual abuse, there's always the fallback to genocide. Genocide doesn't have to involve death or even violence. Just remove their sacred ties to the land which, based on their level of alcohol, they are in no condition to revere. Just scatter them to the four winds and make them settle down in regular society and assimilate.
1. Remove anyone not part of a recognised indigenous tribe out of the NT. 2. Give indigenous communities full independence and nationhood for the NT. 3. Let them do what they want and do not intervene for any reason, lest the white supremacy sneaks in. 4. Problem solved.
They are held to the same laws. It’s a shame that a culture that survived for over 70k years was all but destroyed in less than 100. Aborigines were communal since time immemorial. What is yours is mine, what is mine is everyones. There certainly needs to be an evolution from this point onwards and the way forward is through a process that promotes private ownership in my opinion.
Only trouble with that mate is the mining companies will screech the skies down. They are lined up to take over the land in the NT anyway they can
