Aboriginal Liberation Through Integration

The task of reducing Aboriginal violence is not primarily about more or better women’s shelters, night patrols, police stations, anti-violence education programs, alcohol and drug programs and restrictions, or longer sentences for Aboriginal perpetrators of violence. While such measures may have crucial roles in securing victim safety, they have been unable to address the inability of separate Aboriginal communities, either in remote, discrete locations, or in the cities, to expunge norms of violence. If we keep to a self-determination model, we will keep needing crisis responses, major inquiries and interventions, and decades more of assaulted Aboriginal women having to abandon their country and their community in order to get some safety. We will keep having to endure the painful dilemma of either leaving Aboriginal children in households and communities of chronic neglect and abuse, or taking them away to a place of safety to live their lives with the indelible pain of being…