FINDING TRUTH IN THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT
© Don Tate
Watching the Black Lives Matter marches (Australia) which, ironically, seemed to be predominately comprised of ‘outraged’ white-skinned people, I wondered how many of those aboriginal men complaining about police ‘brutality’ and ‘deaths in custody’ were actually violent men themselves in private, and how that violence played out in their communities.
The fact is, it isn’t hard to find evidence that aboriginal men are more pre-disposed to violent behaviour than non-indigenous men — with concomitant impact on their families and communities.
Let’s start in 1788 when Captain Watkin Tench of the First Fleet noticed that ‘savage violence’ towards aboriginal women was rife. In his work, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, Tench describes how an Aboriginal, Woollarawarre Bennelong was observed bashing his second wife, Barangaroo, with ‘blows and kicks and every other mark of brutality’ — for which Barangaroo received no pity from on-lookers.
This was the first official account of domestic violence in Australia and was, apparently, rife in Aboriginal societies and culture at the time, and remains so to this day.
Yet, Woollarawarre Bennelong is revered by some, and some even demand that a statue of him be erected in NSW alongside the likes of Captain Cook and Governor Arthur Phillip — neither of whom had a history of wife-bashing.
(Bennelong does have a significant geographical location named after him in Sydney though — Bennelong Point.)
Creative Spirits (an Aboriginal Resource site) lists statistics of abuse by aboriginal men (and women) that cannot be ignored:
- that an Aboriginal youth is 10 times more likely to be the victim of proven abuse or neglect than their white peers
- that an aboriginal child is 4 times more likely to to die as a result of assault than white children
- that an Aboriginal baby is almost twice as likely to die to be neglected, or abused than a white baby
- that 25% of Aboriginal women who died in Western Australia between 1983 and 2010 were the victims of homicide
- that Aboriginal Australians are 20% more likely to commit offences of violence than their non-Indigenous counterparts
- that 80% of jaw fractures in Aboriginals in the Northern Territory were caused by alcohol
- that 90% of Aboriginal children in Victoria who have been removed from their homes was because of family violence
- that Aboriginal women are between 23 and 35 times more likely to be hospitalised due to family violence than non-Aboriginal families (the differing statistics come from two different sources)
- that Aboriginal women are 11 times more likely to be killed as a result of violent assault than non-Aboriginal women (in Western Australia, the figure is 17 times more likely)
- that in Alice Springs alone, 1500 people were admitted to Alice Springs hospital between 1998 and 2005 with stab wounds — the highest number of stabbings in the world (some the result of cultural practices)
More alarming is the fact that there have been 714 cases of sexual offence involving children under the age of 16 during the past five years in the Northern Territory alone— including the rape of toddlers.
BLAME COLONIALISM?
But, of course, there are those apologists who would prefer to look further afield for excuses and blame colonialism for the violence rather than it being a cultural norm. One writer, feminist Germaine Greer in a Sydney Morning Herald article , The Rage Epidemic (August 2nd 2008) said:
‘After 200 years of abuse, physical and mental, we should not be surprised to find towering rates of domestic violence…’
They would offer the simplistic view that the ‘invaders’ (a few hundred sailors and troops and convicts) attempted to destroy Aboriginal cultures, resulting in ongoing disadvantage. This disadvantage included the dispossession of land, the forced removal of children, structural racism, economic disadvantage, intergenerational trauma and deep-seated distrust of authorities which led to family violence proliferating in Aboriginal communities.
Some (like the would-be Australian pirate, and author, Peter Fitzsimmons in particular) make much of the fact that Captain Cook fired two musket shots at aboriginals when he landed. What they ignore, is the fact that they were threatened by aboriginals with spears, so as anyone in that situation would do, they reacted accordingly. (There are no reports of any aboriginals actually being wounded in the encounter.)
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that violence between aboriginals and white men occurred over many years, known as the ‘Frontier Wars’ — just as occurred between warring aboriginal tribes at one point or another in the preceding 60,000 years.
Violence towards others was not a dynamic precipitated by the arrival of white settlers to Australia.
Interestingly, in a letter to the editor, published in the Koori Mail (a paper specifically for Aboriginals) an Aboriginal woman, Dixie-Link-Gordon, wrote,
‘Domestic and family violence in urban Aboriginal communities is happening. Community violence is running amok. It’s a sad situation when others in our community make the choice to follow, if not participate, in these violent confrontations… There is really not one Aboriginal person who can say that community, domestic and family violence has not affected their mob or themselves on some level — including me.’
Straight from the mouth of one who lives it.
AN ABORIGINAL ACTIVIST SPEAKS OUT
Aboriginal activist, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, has slammed Black Lives Matter protesters as ignorant ‘narcissists’ who don’t understand indigenous problems.
‘Just watching the footage of protesters and the conversations around white privilege makes me sick to my stomach,’ she told Sky News. ‘These are narcissists … they don’t have to do any hard work just appear as though they care.’
Ms Price, a Warlpiri woman and Alice Springs Town Councillor, went on to say that ‘more Aboriginal people die outside of police custody than within it, with the majority of Aboriginal people killed and maimed by other Aboriginal people. But because the violence is out of sight, out of mind, protesters don’t care. You don’t care because the perpetrators are also black, and that’s the big problem,’ she said. ‘People only care if there’s seen to be a white perpetrator.’
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2014–15 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey, more than one in five or 22.3 per cent of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged over 15 had experienced physical violence or threats in the previous 12 months.
Half of all of those who had experienced physical violence over the 12-month period said that their most recent attacker was a family member.
‘This is the reality that goes on in the remote communities that these protesters care zero for,’ Ms Price said. ‘They do not care one bit. They stand there virtue-signalling and acting as though they’re so terribly sorry for the racism that Aboriginal people are faced with.’
BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY?
As for the ‘black deaths in custody’ argument, and the faux outrage that goes with them, it is academic laziness on the part of those who join in the marches not to be cognizant of the true facts.
The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (conducted between 1987 and 1991) to investigate the underlying social, cultural and legal issues behind the 99 recorded deaths in custody of Aboriginals (and Torres Strait Islanders) during the 1980’s, concluded:
- that the 99 deaths were not due to police violence
- and that ‘… the immediate causes of the deaths do not include foul play, in the sense of unlawful, deliberate killing of Aboriginal prisoners by police and prison officers..’
- that 37 of the deaths were the result of disease
- 30 were self-inflicted hangings
- 23 were caused by other forms of external trauma, especially head injuries (done to themselves)
- and that 9 were immediately associated with dangerous alcohol and other drug use.
(It is important to note, if I am correctly informed, that if police pursue a stolen car for instance, driven by an aboriginal man, and the man is killed in an accident as he flees, this is regarded as a ‘death in custody’ even though police never laid hands on him. Similarly, if an arrested aboriginal man suspected of having drugs chooses to swallow the lot while he’s in the paddy wagon and dies, it is correctly regarded as a ‘death in custody’, but should it really be regarded as the fault of police?)
THE ROYAL COMMISSION FINDINGS
After four years of hearings, and enormous evidence and debate, the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody could not point to a common thread of abuse, neglect or racism.
There were however, facts relating to the ‘aboriginality’ of those killed which had a bearing on how they died, specifically that:
‘…there appeared to be little appreciation of and less dedication to the duty of care owed by custodial authorities and their officers to persons in custody.’
But the Commission did find evidence that there was, in general, a system failure to provide adequate care that was causally related to the deaths, but even this finding was open to debate.
Most significantly, the Royal Commission reported that Aboriginal people in custody died at about the same rate as non-Aboriginal people in custody, but the rate at which they came into custody was much higher, in particular police custody, so the 99 deaths simply represents that over-representation.
Aboriginals in jail
As for why there is an over-representation of Aboriginals in custody is altogether another argument for another day.
Suffice to say that according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, while indigenous Australians represent just 3% of the total population, they make up 27% of the prison population and 55% of the youth detention population.
Instead of blaming police, and looking to external reasons, perhaps the outrage of the Black Lives Matter protestors would be better directed at the elders within aboriginal councils to explain why aboriginal crime is so pronounced.
