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 removed from their families.

Mainstreaming or integration is the necessary path if we are to overcome the traditional acceptability of Aboriginal violence. However, the violence itself impedes this necessary integration. The nation’s policies of encouraging separatism, self-determination and cultural continuity, rather than equipping Aboriginal people with a benign or empowering self-sufficiency, have trapped them in an oppressive, violent, non-Enlightenment culture. The only way to counter this is to develop effective pathways to the mainstream.

Great commitment is needed to bring about essential cultural changes. Listing situations in which elders call for young people’s compliance to tradition illustrates this. In the following cases, young people’s human rights are betrayed, and all of us have a shared responsibility to find solutions:

• The rape of an under-age teenage girl by her traditionally-promised husband in his fifties.

• The abduction of an under-age teenage girl by her traditionally-promised husband in his fifties, with the help of her own grandmother.

• The continued practice of polygamy especially by older men, resulting in oppression, particularly of young women, and a shortage of marriageable women for single young men.

• Correct-skin marriage, which is incompatible with modern, more natural patterns and freedoms regarding love and marriage partners. Correct-skin marriage imposes tight limitations on who one can marry, like religious, race, caste or class restrictions that cause suffering for young people the world over. The skin system for marriage was a repeated item in community submissions to the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) for recognition of codified Aboriginal laws, for instance, in the Roper River submission:

If a person steals someone who is promised to another person in marriage, or if a person goes with a person of a different skin group, they should also be punished in our traditional way by the elders, and if necessary by physical punishment.

• Dangerous, mutilating, enforced subincisions still carried out on young men and boys as part of initiation.

• Avoidance laws such as mirriri, which if not complied with, can carry the threat of violent punishment, particularly against women.

• Violent punishment. A Mornington Island submission to the ALRC of codified traditional law offers some protection of young people against elders, but is sadly telling in the breach:

young men may have to defend themselves with a fighting stick against an elder (but no blows will be delivered to the body) …

 • Misogynistic rules for women’s place in society, such as this Lajamanu law submitted to the ALRC:

If a widow wants to marry again she must get permission from her son-in-law first and then from her late husband’s brothers and there should be an agreement with close relatives, if there is no agreement then the widow should not marry again, but should be dealt with through the Court.

Stronger anti-violence norms are more readily acquired through immersion in everyday mainstream life, rather than through “top-down” attempts to teach or enforce non-violent norms in discrete minority cultures. Positive daily interaction, help and kindness from ordinary people in mainstream society are reported by Ayaan Hirsi Ali as helping refugees integrate and experience belonging. Even just acquiring knowledge about how mainstream culture works helps in the process of belonging or integration.

Aboriginal Australians, when given the opportunity have, particularly since the 1950s, displayed great capacity for cultural adaptation including educational achievement, and many thousands live successful, violence-free, well-adapted lives. Research undertaken by the late indigenous education leader Maria Lane and her husband Joe, shows that when Aboriginal people are not segregated from mainstream society, their adaptation, including educational achievement, approaches mainstream levels.

Joe and Maria Lane show that separatist and differential strategies inhibit positive, mainstream progress. Welfare and segregation policies arising in the 1970s—including in the cities—have resulted in what Maria Lane described as “the Congealing of an Embedded, or Encapsulated, Welfare-Oriented Population”, posing for her the question, “Two diverging populations?” Here we see the harm of well-intentioned but misplaced policy. It is separatist policy, not the presence of an intractable Aboriginal opposition, that is the fundamental barrier, resulting in many thousands of young Aboriginal Australians lacking opportunities to reach their potential.

The acquisition of new norms among young women is not without dangers. Without a whole raft of additional supportive responses, in particular police, judiciary, and a permanent safe place for young women to live in freedom, a man’s traditional sense of entitlement, and use of violence to enforce it, can still triumph over the emancipation of a young Aboriginal woman’s mind.

Above all, Aboriginal victims of violence need policies or pathways that secure for them a positive, productive and safer life. Whatever our guilt, whatever our despair, in order to liberate Aboriginal people from violence, we must be guided by the following principles.

Enlightenment values are non-negotiable. A barrier to overcome is the strange, recent offspring of liberal-democratic thinking. This is the justified aversion to Western imperialism, but naively expressed as an uncritical, romantic commitment to traditional cultures. For ideological and pragmatic reasons, some scholars and professionals condone traditional norms that are antithetic to Enlightenment values. What has happened to these professionals? Shouldn’t they be appalled at the very portent of irrational long-term retribution? How are children expected to thrive under such fearful conditions? The discrete Aboriginal community seems to be the pyrrhic “winner” in the culture wars here, but there are no winners, only victims, and a weakened mainstream polity.

Professionals need to be compassionate ambassadors of Enlightenment culture, and skilfully engage, indeed argue in the spirit of respect and friendship, with these communities on the need to shed maladaptive practices. This is particularly so in remote communities where professionals are a main source of face-to-face engagement with Westerners. That such respectful challenge is not happening enough, however, might indicate a professional surrender to the reality that cultural adaptation to mainstream ways is too difficult in most remote community settings.

Feminism is an important aspect of Enlighten­ment thought that has also lost confidence. Aboriginal victims need a strong feminism to assist their emancipation, rather than the present silence and surrender to the scant hope that most Aboriginal women can liberate themselves, with the Western feminist role being to listen and to help only when asked. “We have left it in their hands”, “This is as much as we can do” and “All we can do is support them” are three expressions of this white reluctance to intervene in Aboriginal violence that I heard during my field work. Violence against women is the misuse of male power to control women, to curtail women’s personhood. It is very difficult for victims of oppressive, culturally endorsed, male abuses to speak out about their subjugation. As Enlightenment feminists, we need to advocate confidently and assertively for Aboriginal victims of violence, and condemn practices that oppress women.

Equal rights under one law, and the need to accept that violence against Aboriginal women is steeped in tradition. Somewhat paradoxically, along with the unhelpful professional adaptation to violence within Aboriginal culture, are attempts to deny the traditional drivers of violence against Aboriginal women. The legal system needs to address the moral hazard regarding more lenient sentences, in that if Aboriginal culture allows men to be violent against women, violent Aboriginal men might be more recidivist and dangerous, because they see their actions as legitimate.

The factor of culture in Aboriginal men’s violence against women renders Aboriginal women particularly vulnerable, compliant, silent victims, requiring a stronger application of Enlightenment principles, and additional, not less, police, judicial and other service assistance and protection, particularly in remote, traditional communities. Instead, particularly before the Intervention, we have delivered to Aboriginal people the opposite, with remote communities typically having scant access to police help. What a grave act of sexism on our part: all feminists should be loud in their condemnation. We betray both Aboriginal women and our Enlightenment polity here. Again, there are no winners.

Equal rights under one law, and children are more important than culture. Where there is abuse and neglect of children, adults must be held responsible and accountable. The state has a duty to provide parents with assistance, education or mentoring, but if lack of interest or capacity in a family or community to care adequately for its children persists, the state has a responsibility to intervene. The nation has an immediate duty of care to these children by ensuring that they no longer live in a violent home or violence-ridden community or in chronic neglect.

If we keep to policies that lock Aboriginal people out of mainstream life, we will keep having to face the dilemma of leaving neglected Aboriginal children to suffer in their dysfunctional families and communities, or taking the children to safety, away from their birth family, away from their kin community. To avoid such a heartbreak policy choice, we need to provide whole families, not just children, a safer life.

Barriers to shifts from violence are too high in many remote communities. Despite exemplary projects and model communities since the beginning of the self-determination years, in most remote, traditional settings, cultural practices and other behaviours maladaptive to mainstream life are more often affirmed than challenged. This is inevitable when communities are shielded, both geographically and with welfare, from the mainstream’s values, demands and law enforcement.

There are good community leaders, but there are also dangerous community leaders, and to assume that all is well if we hear no complaints is to put silent victims at critical risk. Governments must assert their authority, their right to know what is happening on remote communities, and their right and duty to protect individuals—men, women, the elderly, young people, children and infants—from violence. In particular, governments must not allow villains to hide behind the “cultural rights” shield, and must insist on protecting individual rights.

Opening up remote communities to the mainstream world. Small, remote Aboriginal communities share some of the problems that small, remote, mainstream townships face regarding social isolation and economic viability. For small remote Aboriginal communities, isolation from the mainstream is intensified by those traditional norms that are maladaptive to mainstream demands, and by the permit system. The permit system can be an instrument of control for community “leaders”, as it limits the access of vulnerable community members such as young women to outside ideas, friendship and help. We owe it to the most vulnerable in these communities to remove a community’s right to keep outsiders out.

Such contact has potential as a non-threatening, enjoyable, enduring bridge to mainstream life, trust and friendship. This mainstream–remote exchange concept could be extended into programs such as urban–remote “sister” communities, parishes and schools. These would be based on mutual support, holidays and friendship. These exchanges are not about facilitating transitory lifestyles or providing on-demand cheap city accommodation for remote area people. Rather, they would provide remote Aboriginal people with a trusted, enriching long-term connection with mainstream urban people.

The concept is a bridging process rather than an end in itself, and it might need to operate for years, to provide a much-needed counterpoint to the damaging isolation imposed by self-determination. It is important that we do not limit such schemes to a few communities, content that a few “model projects” are happening. As most communities have suffered under the isolating “self-determination” regime for decades, such opening up of remote Aboriginal communities to the mainstream and its universal rights values, in a spirit of friendship and welcome, is needed across the nation.

Getting to the cities. Encouraging Aboriginal people to leave remote settlements for a positive, safer future is probably the most important task, but it is also a troubling and challenging one. Given this, I cannot see how a reduction in government funds necessary to keep these communities going can be made without significant pain of loss and resultant protest, and my heart is in my throat when I approach the subject. I take strength from Steve Etherington’s plea and plan to help the necessary process of leaving for the cities in the most compassionate way possible.

There are remote area people who will want to move to urban and regional areas where there is mainstream employment, but who lack the confidence and resources to do so. For them, the main policy task is to assist them, financially and with education, training and employment mentoring, into safe, good quality, affordable urban housing in good employment and education centres. There are exemplary training and employment programs in place to assist Aboriginal people into mainstream employment such as Generation One, and the Aboriginal Employment Strategy established by cotton farmer Dick Estens.

This need is great. At present even trained, employed people on Aboriginal communities might be under-equipped for mainstream life and locations. Addressing this inequality would help towards successful mobility including to urban, mainstream life. Some remote Aboriginal people who want to move will need other forms of support, such as welcome programs that help Aboriginal families settle into everyday town and suburban life. The Aboriginal-initiated Family Resettlement Program of the 1970s, Australian programs assisting new overseas migrants, and the welcome given to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other refugees by the kind parishioners of Ede in Holland, could be good models here.

Etherington emphasises the need for specialised urban housing. His blueprint to meet various housing needs and to manage likely problems is well worth considering. A central goal is to extend the mainstream principle sought by many Aboriginal people seeking a better, safer life—that individuals and nuclear families have a right to control who lives in their home—against a cultural principle of “demand-sharing” to provide shelter to kin. This can threaten, at times violently, even urban Aboriginal women such as a single mother trying to establish a more mainstream lifestyle in a non-crowded, orderly house in a quiet suburb, just right for her and her children. It also threatens all seven parameters for children’s good education as listed by Ken Henry.

There are Aboriginal people who want to remain on remote communities. They might include Aboriginal people with a rich affinity to country and commitment to ceremony, but through a modern, reformed, non-traditional but still distinctly Aboriginal culture, that has shed dangerous and oppressive practices and replaced them with universal rights principles of individual equity and non-violence. Even if the lifestyle might be markedly different, perhaps in terms of a less materialist lifestyle and a spiritual attachment to country, it is integrated with the Australian community and polity because it shares its individual human rights values. Hence there is no polygamy, no promised marriage, no child brides, no forced skin rules regarding marriage, no avoidance relationships, no humbugging, no deferred blaming and payback, no sorcery, no cruelling, and no legitimised use of violence of any form among these Aboriginal people. They, including their children and young people, will derive meaning and richness from this alternative, integrated Aboriginal lifestyle and have no “need” for alcohol, kava, petrol sniffing and other substance abuse, nor gambling addiction, nor pornographic films. These communities will be safe, non-crowded, open and positive places, have a modern, non-fatalistic approach to health and disease, have no permit system, and have no need for heightened attention from the law. Their young people will not suffer the high levels of vulnerability, resignation and despair that lead to ill-health, crime and suicide. These people will have the flexibility and capacity to provide the same opportunities for their children as those enjoyed by Aboriginal people living a mainstream lifestyle and by non-Aboriginal children, securing quality primary, secondary and tertiary education for them, and ensuring that their children have the full mainstream choice and capability for a career, to be what they want to be, and to live wherever they want to live, when they grow up. For this integrated group, remote life on beloved lands could be a rich and noble choice.

After many years, however, self-determination is a proven poor generator of such remote area cultural reform and positive adaptation. Among those resistant to shifting to cities would include many dysfunctional, violent families and communities: indeed, the families and communities with the fewest skills for adjustment to mainstream urban life. For these, the policy courage must start. For these Aboriginal people, policies of integration that are both difficult and compassionate must be made and implemented.