July 11, 2015

Grotesquely high rate of murder and violence towards women in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities

In aid of political correctness, the writer below initially highlights a few cases affecting whites.  I have not reproduced those mentions below. The writer does however get around to mentioning where most of the violence in the NT comes from:  Aboriginal communities.  I have seen with my own eyes the casual violence Aboriginal men visit on their women

I have lived in Darwin and people there certainly do like a drink and are not very politically correct but there are no big differences between the white people there and other white Australians.  They're mostly from other parts of Australia anyway

Everything that could be tried to improve Aboriginal behaviour has been tried, from paternalism to permissiveness.  The only remaining thing that could be done to protect the Aboriginal women and children would be a much beefed-up police presence in Aboriginal communities.  But governments shrink from that for both political and cost reasons.  

Aboriginal behaviour was much better when missionaries ran the communities but wild horses could not bring that back

The Northern Territory murder rate has soared, making it not only the homicide capital of Australia but outstripping New York City and western Europe.

Australian Institute of Criminology figures show the Top End has a homicide rate of 5.5 per 100,000 people, meaning only Africa, crime ridden South America, the war torn Middle East and a few spots in Asia and Eastern Europe are more dangerous.

Much of the Northern Territory violence is against women where those fortunate not to have been killed are 80 times more likely to be hospitalised for assault or injury, than women in any other state in Australia.

The NT's rate for murder and manslaughter is five times the average in all Australian states - which range between 1 and 1.4 - and at 5.5 is not far behind the global rate of 6.2. New York City, where murders have declined, has a rate of four.  

The world average takes into account violence in South American countries like Venezuela, which has a massive 53.7 murders per 100,000 population, the Caribbean where St Kitts and Nevis is 33.6 and African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo (28.3).

The NT's 233,300 people means it is the least populous of Australia's eight states and territories spread over 1.34m sq km. It is one-third the size of India, and has .0002 of India's population, but 1.5 times India's murder rate.

But violence fuelled by poverty and substance abuse have contributed to hike in the rate of unnatural deaths.

Apart from terribly high rates of violence, unemployment is rife, and thousands of people are battling alcohol and gambling abuse, and addiction to cannabis and, increasingly, methamphetamine or ice.

In this place, up to 20 [Aboriginal] people live in some houses and children are stressed out and neglected.

In remote [Aboriginal] areas, up to 65 per cent of children attend school for fewer than three days a week and up to 60 per cent of them fail the national early developmental index which measures a child's ability to cope with starting school.

Murders, attempted murders or just assaults among family members or domestic partners are horrific in detail.

Many assaults are perpetrated by husbands or male partners on women. They include raping with wooden or metal objects, or murdering by repeatedly punched striking with available objects such as a saucepan, stones, concrete, axes, steel pipes, lumps of wood, star pickets, wheel braces or tools.

In one case of Northern Territory murder, a man who used a hose to whip his 32-year-old wife, stomping on her abdomen and dragging her naked body over rough ground, before raping her, and then bashing her with either a stick or metal pole, causing severe internal injuries, before finishing her off with a rock.

In another horrific case, which occurred at an [Aboriginal] outstation on the NT's remote Coburg Peninsula, which lies 570km north-east of Darwin, right at the top of the Territory, a 27-year-old man named Trenton Cunningham attacked his pregnant wife, Jodi Palipuaminni, mother of his four children.

Cunningham was on parole for assaulting Ms Palipuaminni with a steel bar and pouring boiling water over her, causing scalds that required skin grafts to 20 per cent of her body.

Over years of abuse, during which she had complained 29 times to health workers, Cunningham had whipped her with wire, kicked her pregnant stomach, and stabbed her with scissors.

In May 2005, he attacked her one last time because Ms Palipuaminni declined to bring him a cup of water.  No-one reported her screams for help and she was dead by morning. Cunningham's charge was reduced from murder to manslaughter and he was sentenced to a minimum 6.5 years.

In January, a swimming pool manager the remote Indigenous [Aboriginal] community of Yuendumu, 300 kilometres north west of Alice Springs was found dead.

Last December, Major Crime Squad Detectives charged a 39-year-old man with murder following the death of a 36-year-old woman in Charles Creek [Aboriginal] Camp in Alice Springs yesterday.

On a Saturday night in August last year,a group of men fatally assaulted a 48-year-old man in front of witnesses in a car park in central Darwin.

In November, 2013,  a man named Conway Stevenson was arrested over the death of his wife at the indigenous [Aboriginal] Bagot community, in the inner northern Darwin suburb of Ludmilla.

Hours before she was killed, the woman had stripped naked after Stevenson had told her , 'I don't want you any more'.

Later on Stevenson, looking for his wife, had told a woman, 'I’m going to murder her'.

The Australian Institute of Crime's Matthew Willis, said the rates of family violence among indigenous [Aboriginal] people was much higher than non-indigenous because 'it’s really hard for the Territory to provide community-based services — and it’s one of the issues for people living out in remote communities. 

'There’s not a lot in the way of services particularly to address offending behaviours and to help for people trying to escape from family violence,' he told news.com.au.

South Australian university lecturer and anthropologist, Professor Peter Sutton, identified an area in Central Australia which included the Northern territory as a violent trouble spot.

'There is a tri-state area in the middle of Australia which is a Bermuda triangle for domestic violence against *Aboriginal*  women,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'People don't want to know, but how about women being raped by a burning fire stick or by a star picket?  'The society where this is going on is very different from the middle-class Aboriginal people that many people know.

"These are hair trigger communities where people fly into a rage in a second. People are under the influence of alcohol and there are beatings and stabbings. Resorting to physical violence is the norm.'

Dr Howard Bath, the Northern Territory's Children's Commissioner said statistics from the NT's five major government hospitals showed that in 2010 the number of non-indigenous females hospitalised for assault was 0.3 for every thousand women in the population.  The rate for indigenous females was 24.1 per thousand, or 80 times the rate.

'In numbers, that was 27 non-indigenous females being admitted, compared with 842 indigenous women being treated for assault,' he said.  'What we are looking at is a disastrous situation in terms of the risk of violence to indigenous women.

'These numbers are mind boggling. The rate of abuse of these women is enormously high and children are being exposed to this, resulting in very, very high rates of child neglect.'

Aboriginal men and to a lesser extent Aboriginal women and non-indigenous men were responsible for violence against Aboriginal women.

Dr Bath blamed alcohol and drug abuse, overcrowding and 'consistent unemployment'.  'Alcohol is the worst factor by a country mile,' he said. 'Between 60 and 70 per cent of violence is directly related to alcohol.

'The facts are generally known, but it's a delicate area. Most of the people who are familiar with the details don't want to put a set of shameful allegations against the Aboriginal community and in particular the menfolk.'

SOURCE

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