Indigenous women are often rightfully cynical of the mainstream remedies available to them when they are the victim of family violence. I know from my own experience there are racist undertones that accompany the way family violence among indigenous people is dealt with by many mainstream services and systems – there’s a ‘‘leave ’em to it, it’s their way’’ mentality that indigenous women work against to be taken seriously as if somehow victimhood is part of our cultural legacy (it isn’t). And our own specialised services often suffer from acute underfunding. The situation for indigenous women in some rural and remote areas is so dire that you prefer to avert your gaze. Recent figures out of the Northern Territory suggest that Aboriginal women are 80 times more likely to be hospitalised for assault than non-Aboriginal women. Eighty. Times. More. Likely. You can imagine the frenzied response if that statistic was being played out among young white men on the streets of Kings Cross.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:27:36 +0000
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