Australian Aborigine Communities Awash With Abuse

SYDNEY, Australia, July 17, 2007 — -- The release of a landmark report detailing widespread sexual abuse, domestic violence and alcoholism in Aborigine communities has plunged Australiainto a soul-searching debate in recent weeks.

At the center of the current controversy lies a study called Little Children Are Sacred,which was released in June.

The report cites rampant alcoholism, fueled by the prevalence of home-brewed "river grog," as spawning an epidemic of violence. Investigators found that young girls are being routinely abused, often by family members, while children as young as 3 are being exposed to pornography. Teenage Aborigine girls are performing sexual favors in exchange for drugs and alcohol from predominately white miners who work the remote outback areas of the country's Northern Territory. Girls as young as 12 are becoming mothers, investigators said.

Most troubling, according to Pat Anderson, co-chair of the report, is that most of the abuse goes unreported. "Where there is unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, drug taking, overcrowding, unemployment, you can guarantee that those children are severely at risk and eventually going to be sexually abused or abused in some way," Anderson told Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on the day the report was released.

That same day, Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough summarizedthe public's prevailing mood. "This is a national disgrace, it's a disaster and it is something that should never happen in this country."

First-person accounts of abuse have been riveting. Shedeena Liberty Black, from New South Wales, wrote about childhood sexual abuse in the Sydney Morning Herald.

"I'm still taunted by some of my abusers and the people who support them. They call me 'gutter trash,' 'fruitcake,' 'handicapped slut'...it is awful," Black wrote.

In response to the report, the government announced it will ban alcohol, confiscate pornography and withhold welfare payments from families who fail to make sure their children attend school.

In addition the government has a controversial proposal to scrap the permit system on Aborigine land, which currently allows indigenous inhabitants to regulate who enters their land.

And in an unprecedented move, Australian federal police have been deployed to 60 Aborigine townships to help police deal with the surge in violence.

The country is deeply divided about the report and the government's response. Many have called it a knee-jerk reaction that violates the country's anti-discrimination laws.Other say the country should focus on getting Aborigine communities more jobs and housing.

Chris Graham, editor of the National Indigenous Times, rejects the government's plan out of hand. He said the abolition of the permit system is intended to limit Aborigine control over their land, not solve issues of child sexual abuse."It will irrefutably weaken the capacity of the Aboriginal people to determine what happens to their land," he told ABC News in a telephone interview."It will open up the land to white mining interests and other interests. Nowhere in the world other than Australia would you ever see the rights of indigenouspeople so assaulted. We are the modern-day South Africa," he said.

Like the United States, Australia has struggled to come to terms with a long history of abuse of its indigenous population. Aborigines lived in isolation for up to 60,000 years before the arrival of British settlers in 1788.

But the last two centuries of European control left the Aborigine population in tatters, and in most areas, completely displaced. The 450,000 indigenous Australians now account for roughly 2.5 percent of the population.