3. Community Safety and Violence Reduction Strategies
The tenor of the Little Children Are Sacred Report and the implementation of those recommendations changed significantly under Intervention. The implementation strategy is in direct contrast to the way in which the Little Children Are Sacred recommendations were intended to be implemented.
This is certainly evident where the report calls for the greater participation by Indigenous people and community groups in the justice system. The report recommended a number of mechanisms through which this can occur. It was never envisaged in the report that a policing and legislative response to community violence was to be the main or only option.
In the last twenty five years there have been a number of reports, several Royal Commissions and numerous Government Inquiry’s and Standing Committees that have noted the marginalisation of Indigenous people in the justice system. They have all recommended the development of community based violence reduction strategies as a means of enhancing local participation in these processes. The ALJS was the most advanced and effective of these programs. (Blagg, Allen, Cainduff, Morrison, Little Children Are Sacred Report, Wright)
The ALJS and the Kurduju Committee demonstrated that external intervention by police or others is only effective as a crisis management tool by ensuring personal safety and by stopping the immediate crises. These responses however are rarely effective at preventing or resolving disputes and this in turn leads to the exasperation of conflict by deferring issues that need to be resolved.
The Kurduju Committee observed that external intervention often frustrated community attempts at dispute resolution. In 2001 the Committee documented the main causal factors leading to violence on their communities. They identified eight main issues causing dispute and most had powerful cultural origins including sorcery, the spirit world, breaches of cultural practise and social organisation, payback and disputes between different clan and language groups. Several examples provided from Wadeye and from the Central desert communities pre-dated non-Indigenous settlement of those areas.
The Kurduju Committee describe the causal factors for much of the community conflict on their communities. (Attachment C)
It is not possible for non-Indigenous problem solving to work effectively in an environment where there are such different cultural practises, social organisation and value and belief systems.
The ALJS has shown that external intervention has significantly reduced the capacity of communities to resolve their own issues. Something they were doing effectively until the influx of non-Indigenous governance systems into the larger remote area communities in the 1970s.
“Action based participatory planning is the central component used in assisting communities develop community law and justice plans and implement initiatives arising from the plans. The process involves a wide range of community individuals and organisations as planners, problem solvers and partners in program implementation.
This type of planning revealed the consequences of many years of non-participatory social and community planning, evident in law and justice outcomes. At Ali-Curung, Lajamanu and Yuendumu, individuals and community organisations had largely lost their capacity to resolve their own law and justice issues through the introduction of and consequential reliance on external dispute resolution.
External agencies such as police, social workers, counsellors, advisers, lawyers, the courts, council clerks, local health staff and other non-Indigenous people often become involved in dispute resolution and generally engage in problem solving from a position that requires a legislative framework, or is guided by their statutory responsibilities. They usually approach problem solving from the perspective of their own learned cultural experience which may not be compatible with, or relevant to, dispute resolution in a vastly different culture. In addition to this, agencies have introduced a plethora of new programs and services, not always designed to accommodate Aboriginal management structures or cultural practice.
The disproportionately high rates of incarceration and recidivism among Aboriginal people, their lack of participation and involvement in the law and justice system generally and reports such as the Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into the Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Law, the Australian Institute of Criminology Report into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Task Force on Violence were critical of the effectiveness of the law and justice system for many Aboriginal people and are powerful reminders of the extent to which they have been marginalised and played a minor and passive role in law and justice.
This has hastened the loss of control by Aboriginal people in remote communities over issues effecting family and community, which not many years ago would have been dealt with at the community level. At Ali-Curung, Lajamanu and Yuendumu for example, this resulted in sporadic attempts to address issues, usually when a situation was desperate. The normal recourse though was to simply allow events to develop until Police intervention was inevitable. External agencies too, were mainly located in major regional centres (Lajamanu, for example is 550km from Katherine) and staff only became aware of situations which were already critical, such as women presenting to the health clinic, reports made to police, or women running away to the regional centres. There was little preventative or early intervention work occurring and external intervention was doing little to prevent situations becoming critical in the first place.
It was clear there needed to be a strategic focus to law and justice at the community level which could incorporate the main elements of low level, early intervention by appropriate community groups or individuals, empowerment in law and justice and meaningful participation (partnership arrangements) between the community and the justice system. These processes needed to be controlled by the community, responsible to the community, incorporate the acceptable social, cultural, traditional and contemporary structures of the community, and have a capacity to work across both cultures. This type of intervention in Aboriginal communities is termed Aboriginal Dispute Resolution (ADR).”
(Model for Social Change: The Aboriginal Law and Justice Strategy, 1995-2001)
It remains my strong view that communities can, and do, develop effective violence reduction strategies that work for them. The processes for doing so are well researched and documented. Importantly it requires government and community organisations to enter into community safety and justice partnerships. There are currently no programs that coordinate a holistic response to violence across the myriad of government agencies and community organisations involved in the delivery of law and justice.
The principles and methodologies that underpin the establishment of these
arrangements are described in Attachment D.