Nannette Rogers spoke with Tony Jones - Lateline - ABC
www.abc.net.au/lateline/nannette-rogers-spoke-with-tony-jones/1755090
May 16, 2006 - Nannette Rogers has been Crown Prosecutor in Alice Springs for more than 12 years. Her paper and her comments are specifically drawn from her experience of the Aboriginal community in central Australia during those years and should not be considered a general critique of IndigenousAustralians.Bad Aunty: 10 Years On, How ABC Lateline Sparked The Racist NT ...
https://newmatilda.com › Aboriginal Affairs
Jun 23, 2017 - Known as “the intervention”, this national disgrace destroyed the vestiges of Indigenousself-determination across the Northern Territory and had a .... escape serious punishment; Rogers even referenced a case in which an 18-year-old petrol sniffer simultaneously drowned a young girl while he raped her.A culture of violence that must change - Opinion - smh.com.au
www.smh.com.au › Opinion
May 18, 2006 - The Aboriginal academic Boni Robertson presented graphic accounts of alcohol-
A culture of violence that must change
Not for the first time are we outraged by violence in indigenous communities, writes Miranda Devine.
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CASES of violence and child sexual abuse revealed to ABC's Lateline this week by the Alice Springs Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers reveal conditions in some remote Central Australian Aboriginal communities so depraved and dysfunctional as to defy belief.
Rogers described how a seven-month-old baby was taken out of her home and raped. Blood in her nappy finally alerted somebody that she was injured. She needed surgery under general anaesthetic.
A two-year-old girl left unattended while her mother was away drinking was whisked away by a man and sexually assaulted. She also required surgery.
A six-year-old girl and her friends were followed to a waterhole by an 18-year-old petrol sniffer. "While she was playing in the water, he pulled her under and anally penetrated her and drowned her, probably simultaneously," Rogers said.
Rogers also detailed cases in which girls of 10 and 12 were handed over as "promised wives" to old men who took them away, with the permission of their family, and sexually assaulted them.
These horrendous crimes were catalogued in a dossier Rogers produced for police. Its revelation in gory detail on Lateline has caused ripples of outrage across the country.
But it is not the first time such atrocities have been revealed, tut-tutted over and then forgotten.
In 1999 Queensland's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women's Task Force on Violence published a survey of 25 Aboriginal communities. The Aboriginal academic Boni Robertson presented graphic accounts of alcohol-induced domestic violence and child sexual abuse, including the pack rape of a three-year-old girl.
"I can't remember when I didn't feel scared," one woman told the task force.
Nothing much seems to have changed since.
White Australia has attempted to assuage its guilt about the awful state of many Aboriginal communities with inquiries such as the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and Sir Ronald Wilson's 1997 "stolen children" report. The resultant ostentatious hand-wringing has arguably made life worse for the most vulnerable, voiceless members of already disadvantaged communities, where the word "disadvantaged" doesn't even begin to convey the truth.
The outcry about "stolen children" led to indigenous children being more likely to be left in abusive, dysfunctional families than non-indigenous children because welfare authorities are terrified of being paternalistic and creating another "stolen generation".
A culture of violence that must change
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The Community Services Commission described a few years ago "the current culture of 'hands off' when it comes to Aboriginal children". In 2000, the NSW Child Death Review Team noted the reluctance of authorities to intervene in Aboriginal cases of neglect or abuse: "A history of inappropriate intervention with the Aboriginal families should not lead now to an equally inappropriate lack of intervention for Aboriginal children at serious risk."
Outcry over the deaths in custody report led to more lenient sentencing and a reluctance by the "white legal system" to be seen as further victimising Aboriginal men. Nice in theory, but what about the victims?
An Aboriginal elder, Margaret Kemarre, told Lateline this week that what was needed to protect children and women was less alcohol and tougher sentencing. "It is all right for the judges … sitting up there, and putting things, but they don't know how our feeling of the parents and the whole extended families have … the grief."
Nanette Rogers began working in the Northern Territory as a defence barrister but became "sick of acting for violent Aboriginal men and putting up the same old excuses when I was appearing for them", she told Lateline. She switched to prosecutions after realising "how much emphasis was placed on Aboriginal customary law in terms of placing the offender in the best light, and it really closed off the voices of Aboriginal women, their viewpoints about how customary law impacted on the offence or the offender".
Joan Kimm, a Monash University academic and author of A Fatal Conjunction: Two Laws, Two Cultures,said yesterday she agreed with Rogers "in every point which she makes about indigenous male cultural attitudes to violence towards women".
In her book, Kimm analysed criminal cases dating from the 1950s and described how "indigenous men have relied on the cultural 'defence', that is, elements of traditional law and lore, to exonerate themselves and for mitigation of sentencing when charged with violent assaults on Aboriginal women".
She points out the "paradox" of a justice system which "might put the rights of traditional Aboriginal culture, with its inherent violence towards Aboriginal women, above the universal human right of those very women to live free from violence".
Although "traditional society was very violent to women, it was not like the rampant violence which now occurs because that violence was once confined within a strict legalistic society. The structure of that law and that society has been devastated. Yet that customary law has been successfully pleaded as a cultural defence."
A culture of violence that must change
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Kimm says she hopes Rogers "does not receive the odium (from some non-Aborigines and some Aborigines) which I have incurred for raising this issue".
The odium has begun. Yesterday's edition of the Crikey email newsletter contained criticism of Rogers for "blaming the victim".
And on the Herald's letters page yesterday, Dr David Rose from Gladesville blasted the Latelinestory as sinking to "new depths of shock-jock journalism" and lambasted Rogers for having a "poor understanding of the social and historical background that produced [the crimes]."
Rose objected to Lateline broadcasting "obscene, graphic details of child sexual abuse". Perhaps he would prefer that the crimes go unpunished and the victims' advocates be silenced just so his sensibilities aren't offended.
Full marks to Lateline for pursuing the story so vigorously.
But why did Tony Jones feel the need to ask Rogers: "Are you worried that the information itself may be abused by tabloids and racists even, shock jocks - the sort of people who will take information like this and exploit it?"
Are there really people so morally confused that they see opposition to the rape of babies as a "shock jock" phenomenon?
Geoff Seidner
13 Alston Grove East St Kilda 3183
613 9525 9299
13 Alston Grove East St Kilda 3183
613 9525 9299
