Letters to the Editor
bloomsbury
Published Letters: 365 Editor's Choice: 5
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out of the darkness
[Read the article: Judge: 10-year-old "probably agreed" to sex]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This case has lifted a curtain on the daily lives of the people in these communities. The judge would have been only too aware that most, if not all, of the boys (seven were under sixteen at the time of the offence) had been sexually molested themselves. Babies as young as six months old have been raped in these communities. Girls have been impaled on fence posts. And the judge has seen it all. To find places like these you would have to go to the Congo or Dafur. These places don't make the news under normal circumstances and the spotlight is only on them now because John Howard invaded the Northern Territory with the army to try to win an election. The judge understood the horror of those boys' lives as most people don't. It's incredible hypocrisy for people to claim that a girl who had already been raped previously didn't know what sex was and couldn't consent. There's something creepily Victorian about that paradox. This incident is only a tiny sliver of the nightmare world these children inhabit and I include the nine boys charged with this offence in that. These communities are Australia's shame and they have suffered decades and decades of neglect, been starved of funds and used as a political football by all sides of politics. Now some politicians will jump on the bandwagon and blame the boys involved in an attempt to absolve themselves of blame. Putting them in jail would have removed them from the community but so what? Arukun is full of damaged children just like them. And more are being produced every day. Blaming these teenage boys won't achieve a thing because this gigantic social and sexual mess needs a lot more than knee jerk politics or policies to fix it. Blaming the judge is easy: facing the truth about Arukun is a lot harder. Arukun and all the other places like it need help, not to have their children thrown in jail so some minister can get a front page story.
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my objection AKA
[Read the article: Judge: 10-year-old "probably agreed" to sex]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My objection is not to calling what happened to this girl rape my objection is to the futility of jailing the boys who are themselves victims of a situation that I can assure you is beyond horrific and beyond belief. I live here and I can't believe it myself. What happens in these communities is that children and babies of both sexes are raped, not as an aberration but as a norm. One Aboriginal girl I saw on a program on this subject described how men and boys climbed in and out of her window all night, raping her. She was, I think, five at the time. And this happened on a regular basis. Then people wonder why these children do so badly at school and become drunks and drug addicts! These communities are on a par with the infant rape epidemic in South African townships and spring from the same cause. These people might as well be lost in space for all the contact they have with white Australia and they have no education, no jobs, no money and nothing to do. These young men ARE lost and I can assure you they have been abused, sexually and in every other way by their own communities and ignored by my own government.They see themselves as rubbish people with no future and no hope and young men in that situation have no conscience and no empathy because they've never learned it. No one has modelled conscience and empathy to them. In their world there are only victims and victimizers. This happens in America too, of course. I well remember reading about an American social worker driven to suicidal depression by seeing babies with venereal disease who had been sodomized by adults in their slum households. The common thread in all these situations is that the women in these communities have been brutalized, both as children and adults, and in many cases are destroyed by drugs and drink and cannot even protect themselves let alone their children. Years ago I lived in a place where two Aboriginal families also lived. One family had a strong, quiet woman at its head, she was a widow. Her daughters all had jobs and good jobs too. The other family was an an Aboriginal man and woman with no children. Every Friday night he came home drunk and beat that woman mercilessly. The only sounds were his cursing and the sound of her body hitting the walls as he threw her. I stayed in my bed. To this day I hate myself for doing nothing, not even calling the police because I was too afraid to get involved. I wasn't there long. But those families tell the story. One woman was weak, unassertive and married to a violent alcoholic. What are the chances that her father was exactly the same? The other woman was strong and free of addictions. What needs to happen is for women in these communities to be assisted to take back their power. So far, the Australian government has done nothing to make that happen which is why I despise the current crop of pollies mouthing platitudes about these Aboriginal males to cover their own responsiblity for this mess and screaming for jail as if that's the one and only solution. This is 200 years of injustice and crazy policies coming home to roost so focusing on these particular males will achieve nothing if a radical change in policy doesn't accompany it.