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Saying sorry won't quite be enough
Topic Started: Dec 13 2007, 12:17 AM (144 Views)
Eral
Kopi Luwak
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/ste...7135559313.html
This particular story has been in the paper for about a week - and my first response was incredulity: how on earth could anyone say a ten year old consented to sex? With nine individuals? What on earth is wrong with that prosecutor and judge?
The horrific idea of a community where ten year olds are raped by a gang is bad enough, but ten year olds consenting? WTF??

Today an article appeared explaining why the judge and prosecutor took such an extraordinary stance.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/gir...7135559321.html
The little girl in question is so damaged and deprived she accepts sexual assault as normal. :eek: :hurl: The young men are so brutalised and insensitive -and for some, also damaged- that they see nothing wrong with their actions. :blink: :cry:

This article appeared a little while ago.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/rap...7135587728.html
I don't have a smiley to express my feelings. That these young men may habitually engage in the sexual abuse of girls and women - well, their communities must make Dante's Hell look like a holiday camp.

What kind of life are people leading? How was it the girl's family couldn't keep her safe? How on earth are conditions such as this to be addressed and redressed?
This is a range of responses - and their inadequacy is obvious.
http://www.theage.com.au/letters/index.html

This is from an Aboriginal community leader who has been criticised for having ideas John Howard liked. http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/tak...7135567984.html
The men are all in jail, and the women are living in white communities far away. Yep, that's progress.

How has this continued for so long? What the fuck do we do? If we apply white standards to black communities, we fail them.
If we don't, we fail them.

Many communities that have successfully tackled these disasters have banned alcohol and drugs and sniffable petrol and aerosols.
They train people in skills they can use to maintain infrastructure and machinery, so they have a purpose in life and the communities they live in can function.
They also have education in traditional dance and painting and hunting, so that the young people have a strong sense of identity.
Are there any people able to do this in places like Aurukun?

I can't help thinking it's too late for that little girl, and for those young men, and how many more?

A parallel story. Recently, in Victoria, our government closed down the only indigenous college in the state, because the students weren't meeting national benchmarks for literacy and numeracy. All the kids have to return to mainstream schools. The reason the college was set up was because so many Aboriginal children were getting kicked out of mainstream schools for truancy and delinquent behaviour. The school has been remarkably successful in retaining children from all over the area, and some students rode their bikes a hundred miles to Parliament, to ask for the school to be kept open, to no avail.

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Regullus
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Reliant
The sexual abuse of females must be stopped. The abuse of children must be stopped. It's not a cultural issue it's a humanitarian issue. Further can a society really ever succeed if it devalues 50% + of its population?

The solution? I don't know but I do know this isn't a cultural issue. In Australia, a 10 yr old white girl cannot give consent, the age of consent is a minimum of 13 years. To suggest that a crime wasn't committed is distasteful.

We had a case here, somewhat similar, I kinda ignored it because sometimes you just don't want to know such things, I believe an 11 yr old was gang raped and a defense argument used was she wanted it and consented to it as a type of initiation. Whether the girl was black or white, I didn't note but she was poor and the perps were poor too. Youth is not necessarily a defense but a consideration.

It seems simple to me, if under the age of 13, she/he cannot consent. The perperatrators, if of a similar age should be confined and treated. The opinion of mental health professionals should be weighed as to whether these children pose a future societal danger with an opportunity to appeal any ruling.

Undoubtedly and sadly, you have children in this world who are so poorly treated that unsurprisingly they no longer have empathy for others.

This is too depressing to continue. :(

tempus_teapot
 
I'd like to add that at this point I have taken my Spider Jerusalem action figure and tied his wrist to my Cassidy (from Preacher) action figure just so I can work out which positions are feasible with them and which aren't.

Read that and weep, internet. Weep!

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lara
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Kopi Luwak
I think the point is that all of these children are victims. And yes, it is probably too late to make their lives any better, to teach them empathy and understanding, to give them self-respect. Their prospects for a decent life are gone, and they are 10 years old, and none of this can be considered their own faults.

What do we do about it? Our best. We listen and we try to understand and we try, respectfully, to get involved.

Once upon a time in Canada they thought they had the answer to such problems: Remove the children and put them in state-sponsored school run by religious people, where they will be given a chance at better lives. Now, each and every person who attended a school sponsored by our federal government is getting an average of $20,000 for the joys of the experience, and many are getting far more for the years of abuse - mental, physical and sexual - that they suffered.

There are no easy answers. Broken people cannot be fixed, but their lives can be improved. It just takes a hell of a lot of work, a lot of imagination, support for those from the communities who are taking positive action, and respect, respect, respect.
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Quote:
 
17 and 18 and a man 26


Prosecuted as adults and should be put on a permanent sexual offenders list.
tempus_teapot
 
I'd like to add that at this point I have taken my Spider Jerusalem action figure and tied his wrist to my Cassidy (from Preacher) action figure just so I can work out which positions are feasible with them and which aren't.

Read that and weep, internet. Weep!

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Eral
Kopi Luwak
I agree that the adult males should be in prison, and the boys in detention. Especially those for whom it isn't a first offence. The boys who coerced a 16 year old into sex with them, filmed the assault, then put it on You-tube got severer sentences - and there was an outcry about the lightness of the sentence. I also believe the prosecutor and the judge should receive a punishment: the idea of anyone saying that if an intellectually disabled ten year old offers you sexual favours, it's understandable if your reaction is "cor, you bewdy"- well, that person shouldn't be running the justice system.

I think the young men are products of a completely broken society, kind of like South Africa, only without the guns, and the dominant culture and government have to accept responsibility for allowing that society to develop. But there has to be a point where they take responsibility for their actions. Those boys who assaulted that little girl a second time - :spew: - that is their fault.

In prison, those young men won't learn empathy, or better life skills, and can really be considered to be on life's scrap heap: and since they probably never had a chance due to the way they live, in that they are victims. But there has to be a line in the sand, where we say, that is unacceptable.

A few years ago, a 15 year old girl was taken against her will by a much older man to whom she had been promised as a bride, and despite her protests, he exercised what he believed to be his rights. Just ghastly. When the case came to court, the judge said the man was acting in the way he believed was allowed by tribal law, and he was given a suspended sentence. :o It was certainly true - women have crap rights in tribal law (funny about that :rooster: ) but it took an appeal over two years to get the suspended sentence changed to prison time. There was an assumption that it was just unfortunate for the young woman. :blink:

The sentencing system in the NT underwent a review then, to say that some crimes are not understandable confusions over culture.

It appears that Queensland didn't think to do the same.
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lara
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Kopi Luwak
<span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%'>I have to admit that I didn't read the articles because I am inundated with these things on a daily basis and was raised in a neighbourhood with 13-year-old low-track whores and heroin addicts and robbers but I feel passionate about the fact that some things are oh so wrong and oh so unfixable and we have to stop mucking them up further by getting involved over our heads but it's true that if something's unfixable but someone's abusing children there is a duty to do something and not doing anything hurts those more vulnerable</span>
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Nibsi
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I think that's something Karasi could have written.
-Nibby
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Reliant
Eral
 
I also believe the prosecutor and the judge should receive a punishment: the idea of anyone saying that if an intellectually disabled ten year old offers you sexual favours, it's understandable if your reaction is "cor, you bewdy"- well, that person shouldn't be running the justice system.


Couldn't agree more. As horrific as this tale is, I don't quite know what the problem is, the girl is too young to consent to sex. Period. Ergo, depending the age of the participants, forinstance, the 17, 18, and 26 year olds, dependent on the mental abilities, should be tried as adults. What is exculpatory about their acts? She wanted it? We don't know any better? We're all such damaged people that it doesn't matter?

After reading the articles, I believe the girl did consent, again, she is unable to legally consent due to her age, her traumas and quite possible mental deficit.

I'm curious as to what the position of aboriginal leaders is towards this case and the abuse of children in general. What are the sexual mores? What is the attitude towards sexual abuse of children? What is the age of consent within the community? Generally, what is the culture? Are there self governing tribunals?

tempus_teapot
 
I'd like to add that at this point I have taken my Spider Jerusalem action figure and tied his wrist to my Cassidy (from Preacher) action figure just so I can work out which positions are feasible with them and which aren't.

Read that and weep, internet. Weep!

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Eral
Kopi Luwak
That is a very good question. :huh: The only Aboriginal person whose voice has been recorded on the issue is Noel Pearson - the man who wrote the "lock 'em up" article. Not one leader of the Aboriginal communities has spoken or been interviewed. Just Noel. Why haven't we heard from the others? :huh1:

We used to have a formal body of elected Aboriginal leaders, in a commission, ATSIC. Their purpose was to make sure that communities got the resources they needed, had a voice to speak of their problems and what they wanted to do about it, and the leaders always commented on issues. John Howard disbanded it controversially a few years ago, because of nepotism and rorting of funds. Some letters to the editor have suggested that if ATSIC was still in commission this problem would have been dealt with.
I don't know. I think there should be an ATSIC- but I don't know if this seeming prevalence of abuse of children dates from its dissolution.

White age of consent is supposed to apply - which is the crux of the problem, because it isn't. Women have really low status in traditional tribal culture when it comes to sexual relationships: they are the property of the elders and are available once they reach physical maturity. I have a horrible feeling the abuse comes from that. People live in very crowded conditions normally, and there can't be a whole of privacy- all too easy to become desensitised to violence and for children to be inappropriately sexually aware. Also, if I have a deep sense of worthlessness and hopelessness, there's no better way to get a lift than by oppressing someone else. Women have always been convenient in this regard.

That's why I think this is a product of culture: not of indigenous culture, but of the culture of poverty and drugs and no future.
But there are communities which have overcome these problems, or don't have them - so there are solutions. Why is it taking so long in Aurukun?
It begins to occur to me that the white people in charge of responding with money for programs, housing, services are thinking "there's no point, they're just like that." :cringe:
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lara
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Nibby, you're a very bad man
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Reliant
I think the main problem is poverty and the destruction of a way of life.

I was reading some papers on the problems of Native Australian people in Western Australia. One statistic that struck me was a Native was ten times more likely than the mainstream population to suffer abuse from within the family. Stats are difficult but I wondered if you instead compared similar groups of poor and disadvantage if the inequality would be so evident? Or in other words if you compared apples and apples as opposed oranges and apples.

Such an inequality is not of course limited to Western Australian indigenous populations. Similar statistics are found in the Americas, and all parts of the world (if some parts of the world kept stats on such things.)

I started doing some reading about sexual mores, customs, etc. There have been efforts to discuss with the aboriginal women their ideas on how to best approach these issues from within the communities:

Quote:
 
The women wanted to develop educational resources so they could start educating the primary school children, the youth petrol sniffers and substance abuse victims, young mothers, young boys and older men and women on the community.  The women were quite strong in the belief that this practice did not exist in their culture, however, from the 1920’s onward, there were outside influences that impacted upon the community in the most negative ways ever imagined.


I wonder why the 1920s per se?

Edit: Added 'of.' :rolleyes:
tempus_teapot
 
I'd like to add that at this point I have taken my Spider Jerusalem action figure and tied his wrist to my Cassidy (from Preacher) action figure just so I can work out which positions are feasible with them and which aren't.

Read that and weep, internet. Weep!

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Nibsi
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Te zijner tijd
lara
Dec 15 2007, 03:24 AM
Nibby, you're a very bad man

Hah, but oh so right.
-Nibby
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Eral
Kopi Luwak
I take it Karasi is not the Nelson Mandela of PBG. ;D

http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/...97/paisley.html

Quote:
 
The removal and institutionalisation of mixed-descent children (predominantly girls to be trained as domestic servants) was a key strategy...undertaken by state authorities who assumed parental guardianship of their 'illegitimate half-caste' children.


Indigenous Australians have worse outcomes for everything than any other group in Australia. Health, life span, violence, jail, you name it. They are the poorest and most disadvantaged group in Australia. They tend to measure as poorer than poor white people because property possession is often communal, rather than individual.

There was an article a couple of days ago, an interview with an elder woman in a NT community called Wadeye, which was in the kind of crisis Aurukun is. She said a lot of the difficulties the community had encountered was because about 25 different tribal groups had been brought together on the Catholic mission that started the community - and most of them had conflicts with the others. By convincing some of the people to return to their original areas, the violence was massively reduced.

We have been trying to undo the damage done by institutional and government ignorance and racism for years. Since the 70's. Little girls with fetal alcohol syndrome are still being born, and being abused, and have to be removed from their families. It's not good enough.
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lara
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Kopi Luwak
Bex thinks he's terrific. Nibby and I don't. In Karasi's defence, Bex knows him better than we do.
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