grim depiction of reality for many indigenous in Alice Springs and surrounds

I'm reprinting this because in spite of some traces of journalistic hyperbole I believe it does describe accurately the reality of life for many indigenous in Alice Springs and surrounds.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/special-features/in-depth/community-in-crisis-the-fight-to-protect-indigenous-children-from-abuse-and-neglect/news-story/bdd869155c403dd1977fa0f786aa8d83

use https://github.com/nextgens/anti-paywall to bypass paywall to see the pictures and video

Community in crisis: The fight to protect indigenous children from abuse and neglect
Paul Toohey, News Corp Australia Network
May 26, 2018

ON the south side of Alice Springs, a Thursday afternoon, five adults are gathered around a sedan at the entrance to the showgrounds. A man king-hits a woman and she goes down, hard. She is helped up, then carefully lined up and smashed again, in the face. She’s so drunk she has no hope of defending the punch. She goes down again.

Sitting on the window ledge of the car, watching, is a child. This is what she thinks is normal: incoherent adults enacting the brutal afternoon rituals of total alcohol dysfunction, as desensitised locals drive by with barely a glance.

Alice Springs is at Australia’s spiritual heart: the creation point in our landscape, where raw earth blends seamlessly with the cosmic, and even diehard atheists confess to sacred encounters with the almighty red rock. Now that heart is broken.

There’s deep trauma here. Some Aborigines blame white settlement and loss of culture; others see income support as the driver of destruction, because it buys alcohol and obliterates self-reliance.

The tragedy for the child is that she has already been traumatised, by her parents, for whom acts of ultra-violence carry no shame and rarely result in repercussions, other than visits to the ICU.

She has no opportunity to start life clean but is at the vanguard of another broken generation, same as the last. She doesn’t know it, but she is already caught up in a hopeless hunt for answers in which blame will always displace solutions.

Tired and self-interested politicians; overworked and numb cops; distraught and confused welfare workers; cries for more money from all directions. The spotlight never tracks on the parents causing the harm, because of a shielding instinct that says they have been injured by history.

The middle of Australia, from Tennant Creek down to Alice, is at the statistical epicentre of Australian child neglect and abuse. Each attempt to intervene becomes a forced retreat about saving culture, rather than saving kids.

LIFE IN HARM’S WAY

CALABRIA Family Wines, makers of 2017 Richland chardonnay, recommend it be served with grilled polenta and wild mushrooms. In Alice, where it sells in plastic weapon-proof bottles for $8, it’s served with brain-jarring punches and stomps to the head.

When adults hurt each other, children are hurt. The crisis in Central Australia is decades old, going back to the 1950s when the painter Albert Namatjira was prosecuted for buying alcohol for family and friends in the Morris Soak town camp, which led to the murder of a woman by her husband.

It’s been happening ever since. A month ago, a 62-year-old woman was allegedly stabbed to death by her husband at Charles Creek town camp, just near Morris Soak.

The town camps were once stopover places for out-of-towners that became squalid permanent homes; nowadays, they are crowded as people from remote areas stay longer, seeking services and alcohol — and also because life in the bush communities can be bleak, with few luxuries.

Though liquor is banned in the camps and all public places, the rules are in constant, visible breach.

John Boffa, a veteran Central Australian doctor who drives the People’s Alcohol Action Coalition, wants a total lockdown, with police stationed full-time at takeaway outlets refusing alcohol sales to all but those who can provide proof of a permanent local residential address.

He’s got stats to prove when takeaway sales are totally controlled, violence drops accordingly. But point-of-sale prohibition doesn’t address Central Australia’s estimated 4000 problem drinkers, who are chronically dependent and remain free to drink in the town’s bars.

Boffa is extremely reluctant to criticise the Aboriginal constituency, but some statistics cannot be avoided. “The Territory has the highest rate of substantiated child neglect in Australia, and the lowest rate of children in out-of-home care,” he says.

What this means is that children who live in at-risk situations often remain there, without help. Such was the case in Tennant Creek, where Territory Families, the welfare department, received 21 notifications over two years about disruptive behaviour at a notorious address on the town’s eastside.

It was decided there was no basis for intervention because — as reporters were told at the time — the notifications did not directly relate to the small children in the house.

Then, in February, it is alleged a two-year-old girl was raped at the house by a 24-year-old relative.

She would be left with gonorrhoea and require a blood transfusion due to injuries to her genital area.

It was subsequently learned there had been numerous notifications related the girl’s siblings, and the behaviour of her parents, stretching back years. The department’s inaction appears to imply a view that indigenous children have a higher threshold for living with sustained violence than non-indigenous children.

Underpinning such attitudes is the overarching welfare policy, mirrored in all states, which holds that if an indigenous child must be removed, the child should be placed (in descending order) with family and kin; with Aboriginal carers in the community; with carers in another Aboriginal community; and with non-indigenous carers as a last resort.

The ultimate aim is to reunify the child with its family. NT Children’s Commissioner, Colleen Gwynne, says it’s nice in theory, but there’s a shortage of indigenous carers who can satisfy requirements of providing a safe environment.

“Child safety is paramount, so if you’re not satisfied the child will be safe or thrive, you have to find the next best option,” she says.

Simplistic media-generated propositions, such as wholesale adopting neglected Aboriginal kids to white families, have no genuine support — anywhere. “I don’t believe there’s this push to have a whole heap of Aboriginal kids with white families, that’s rubbish,” says Gwynne.

In reality, most Aboriginal children who have been identified as neglected or abused are in white homes, anyway. For the more than 1000 kids in foster care in the Territory — 89 per cent of whom are indigenous — two-thirds are with white carers.

Yet Gwynne says Territory Families feels compelled to fast-track the reunification of the children in foster care with kin. “We have cases where a child has been fostered for six years and all of a sudden a decision is made: let’s reunify them back with family in a community, just like that,” says Gwynne.

“We’ve got to go back to the child. If a child is with foster carers, and the assessment is made that the child is thriving, the child is happy and loved, why would you change it? If the biological parents say we want the child returned, they should need to demonstrate that they absolutely have the capacity.”

CHAOS, NOT CULTURE

White couple Leigh Swift and Yvonne Mudford started caring for a little girl named Mikala when they lived in Tennant Creek. The girl’s Aboriginal parents were drinking and fighting, and leaving Mikala unattended, unfed, unclean and wandering.

Before she was one, Mikala was declared a “child in danger”. Her father had 48 convictions and her mother a heavy drinker who at one point stabbed her husband. Mudford and Swift looked at adoption as a way to protect Mikala.

But Swift, then the local fire chief, was legally too old to adopt. They persisted in caring for Mikala in an informal way.

Several years ago, they told the parents they planned to move to southwest WA. The parents demanded Mikala back, but Swift and Mudford were not willing to throw the child back into a damaging environment.

“They said they were taking us to court,” says Mudford. “I went to a solicitor in Alice Springs and it started from there. They said it would it be tough and expensive. But there was a whole history, not just of Mikala, but two older siblings that had been in foster care.”

Mikala’s parents failed to show up to court. In 2015 the Federal Circuit Court made the highly unusual decision to grant Swift and Mudford sole custody of Mikala. More unusually, Justice Michael Baumann’s orders made no mention of Mikala’s “culture”. It might be guessed he took the view that the only culture she had known was violence.

The judge laid out tough conditions — on the biological parents. They can see Mikala once a year during school holidays, and only during the day. The father cannot visit the child unless in the company of a responsible adult and neither parent can be under the influence of alcohol.

Even so, Swift and Mudford pay for the mother to make regular visits. They even took Mikala to visit her father in prison.

Mikala is now aged nine. She currently lives in Alice Springs. She says she loves school and reading adventure stories. Asked if she is happy, she gives a pause and a such a direct look that you know you’re going to get the truth: “Sometimes, I feel alone,” Mikala says.

To his credit, Swift makes no attempt to edit Mikala or explain what she says. She misses the family she loves, but says she is frightened of them when they drink.

What Mikala tells us is powerful: that out-of-home care is not easy for anyone. It can involve great reward but is, by definition, borne of sadness. “Nothing about this is simple,” says Swift.

THE POVERTY DELUSION

Just after 8pm, a Tuesday night. A white ute driven by a white man pulls in by the Hungry Jack’s, located close by the Charles Creek town camp, associated with hard drinking and homicide.

A young woman, possibly mid-to-late-teens, emerges from low bushes. She approaches the driver, handbag on her shoulder, has a short discussion, then gets in the passenger seat and they drive away.

It has often been claimed without evidence prostitution is coming out of the town camps. Now we have footage. But what does it tell us? No culture is immune from prostitution. Slums are slums, wherever they are, and they always provide victims to the sex trade.

Jacinta Price, a Central Australian woman who identifies as Warlpiri-Celtic, says it does matter.

At the next federal election, Price will take on Labor’s Warren Snowdon. Snowdon is Australia’s longest-serving MP — a 28-year career politician who presides over the nation’s most troubled electorate, Lingiari, but says nothing on child abuse or parental neglect because, one suspects, he does not wish to upset his crucial indigenous vote base.

“There’s Manila, but we’re not a third-world country,” says Price. “Given the rates of sexual abuse and the violence that exists, and the fact these kids are neglected and don’t have safe homes, it’s too easy to turn a blind eye to it.

“I know there’s young girls out there as young as 13, prostituting themselves. The truth is blackfellas know about it but aren’t talking about it. It’s happening and these are Australian children.”

In Alice and Tennant, you’ll hear that Aborigines in live in “abject poverty”. But this is not Manila, the black townships of South Africa or even rust-belt USA.

There’s income support and child money. The free health system is world-class and education is available to all, without cost. Everyone can eat, if they choose. There’s also work, but that requires motivation.

In Alice Springs, there are hundreds of Africans employed in security, shops and government departments. They’re working remote to build credits for their citizenship applications. Good for them, but why aren’t locals doing these jobs?

A Warlpiri man approaches outside Coles for a friendly chat. He’s waiting for his wife, who’s shopping for a trip to Lajamanu, 900kms northwest of Alice, for a royalty payment meeting from the Granites gold mine. He expects she’ll be paid $50,000, tax-free, directly into her bank account.

He says this is “the small one”. She’ll receive a bigger payment later in the year.

NO WORD FOR RAPE

Talking to youth workers around Alice, who spend time with children who roam the town, they say they would never ask them about sex abuse and, even after trust is built, never hear children volunteering stories.

Like many cultures, parents don’t discuss it; abusers are likely family; talking to authority figures is difficult; there may be different understandings of right and wrong; and kids may have poor English.

In the Warlpiri language, there is not even a word for “rape” — they use “kanyi”, which means take.

The youth workers claim most of the kids have FASDs — or foetal alcohol spectrum disorders, caused by mothers drinking during pregnancy, and which can affect learning and may produce physical symptoms.

The children have not been diagnosed: the workers are guessing. They may be right, but this in itself is a problem.

When every child is assumed to have embedded developmental issues, other real-time causes which are just as likely to hinder learning and attentiveness — lack of sleep, poor nutrition and hygiene, the shame of being dressed in dirty clothes, and repeatedly witnessing violence — take a back seat.

“We have to work with those kids, but from a public health perspective it’s more important to work on the chain of events leading up to it,” says the NT’s former children’s commissioner, Howard Bath.

He points to studies by Harvard’s Martin Teicher, who for 30 years has laid out a clinical case that children exposed to neglect, abuse and violence, such as the girl watching the adults fight outside the showgrounds, suffer brain impairment.

Teicher has written that such experiences “can leave an indelible imprint on [the brain’s] structure and function. Such abuse, it seems, induces a cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects that irreversibly alter neural development”.

Teicher says childhood maltreatment “is the most important preventable cause of psychopathology” yet accounts for 45 per cent of child-onset psychiatric disorders.

Says Colleen Gwynne: “So many children have violence around them and the damage caused is significant. They can’t develop because they’re under heightened alert from six months old. They stop developing and thriving.”

The money, the concern, the care is already there. There is a solution: that parents start being parents.

AFTERWORD

IN response to the recent killing of the woman at Charles Creek, Central Australian Aboriginal Congress — Central Australia’s largest indigenous health provider, and a political advocacy group — demanded the resignation of the NT Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw for not having cops permanently stationed at bottle shops.

Congress CEO, Donna Ah Chee, said Kershaw had “abdicated his responsibility to protect law and order and promote public safety, especially for our community.”

But what about responsibility from within the community? Ah Chee said nothing about Aboriginal men creating so much violence.

Myself, and another journalist, have heard off-the-record statements from senior people working in indigenous organisations that some of the recent sex attacks on children are “not that bad”.

They’re wrong — the attacks are bad. This defensiveness seems to be about protecting reputations, and diverting attention from their failures as frontline agencies in order not to draw political fire. Yet all they are doing is further marginalising kids.

alcohol and aboriginal communities revisited

It's confusing when elected indigenous parliamentarians in the Northern Territory call for a relaxation of alcohol controls while at the same time claiming they understand the issues because many of their close family have died through alcohol abuse. In this case I think Russell Skelton and Noel Pearson have thought it through more clearly. The top down alcohol restrictions should stay in place.

THE MIXED MESSAGES
Indigenous MPs call for choice on grog by Amos Aikman

Traditional Tiwi man and the conservative Country Liberal Party member for Arafura, Francis Xavier Maralampuwi, said he was "saddened and embarrassed" by seeing Tiwi people drunk on the streets of Darwin.

"Tiwi people are telling me they should be able to drink full-strength beer in their own community, controlled by their own people," Mr Maralampuwi said.

"Tiwi people are sick and tired of being told what to do by Labor, and Tiwi people are telling me that Labor is treating them like second-rate citizens.

"If you talk about closing the gap, does that mean that whites can drink heavy and blacks cannot?" ...

High-profile aboriginal woman and the CLP's new member for Stuart, Bess Price, said Aboriginal people understood first-hand the problems alcohol could bring, and that existing measures had not worked.

"We are here today and we still have not done anything about the drinkers out there - and these drinkers are our families," Ms Price said.

"We bury people. My four brothers died in a town camp because they drank every day, day in, day out."

She said Aboriginal people had been "bashing our heads against the wall", talking to government experts who thought they knew better.

"They have been there for one day, and they think they know us and they can walk away with just one answer from a person might be visiting that community that day. That is what makes people think they have the answer," Ms Price said.

"No, you do not, because any Aboriginal person you pull up, wherever, will give you whatever answer you want to hear, so you can away, feeling you have been consulted." ...

Ms Anderson predicted that, given the choice, "about 99.9 per cent" of communities would say no to more grog.

"But on this side of the House, we are giving that choice to people," Ms Anderson said.

PUSH BACK
Junking of NT booze policies spells disaster by Russell Skelton

TRIUMPHALISM is the enemy of good government, especially a newly elected one driven by an irrational compulsion to replace all the policy furniture - even when it is new.

Take the Country Liberals government of Terry Mills. Within weeks of him assuming power in the Northern Territory, hubris appears to have got the better of the Chief Minister and his team, most of whom have never seen the inside of a cabinet room. Considered change is to be welcomed when it leads to significant improvements in public policy. When driven by impetuosity the results can be chaotic, ill-considered and potentially disastrous. Such is the decision to junk the banned drinkers register targeting 2300 problem drunks.

A related decision, framed in disingenuous human rights speak, to hold a plebiscite in Aboriginal communities to reconsider grog bans already voted for also makes little sense. Not surprisingly, both policies have come under intense criticism and in the case of lifting grog bans outright rejection.

The Mills government has been a shambles with ministers sending mixed policy signals over bilingual education, pursuing individual agendas and vendettas. Most revealing is the failure to come up with a coherent and credible policy on the most pressing public health issue: excessive drinking.

Blown by fickle winds of Aboriginal policy by Noel Pearson

How can we close the gap on indigenous disadvantage if successive governments just chop and change policies arbitrarily, without proper reference to evidence and history? Given that closing the gap is a generational challenge, we must maintain a commitment to the right social and development policies for a number of decades. The right policies must survive changes of government and, by this definition, must transcend the ideological whims of political parties...

Getting policies right is like hammering an anvil. Reform policy is the convergence of the right analysis, the right strategy and the right implementation. It is a constant work in progress, where the insights and gains are hard won.

During the recent months of debate over alcohol policies I have heard politicians talking how alcohol management plans have driven people out of communities into urban areas. But then I recall the controversy 20 years ago when the mayor of Cairns organised a bus to take itinerants back to their home communities in Cape York, 10 years before alcohol restrictions. Yes, there is an itinerants' problem but reopening the problems back in the communities is not the solution. I hear politicians talking about how alcohol restrictions have resulted in a breakout in the use of cannabis. But the cannabis epidemics in remote communities were well established for more than two decades, long preceding alcohol restrictions.

But this is what happens if you let folklore and anti-intellectual rejection of proper policy analysis drive policy

related: alcohol in aboriginal communities