Earlier this year, Mark Latham stirred up outrage with these comments on domestic violence:

… it’s about how the men look at themselves. Blokes have lost self-esteem, they’ve lost their job, they’re welfare dependent, and they’ve got other troubles, drugs, alcohol, in their life. It’s that loss of self-esteem where I think they use the domestic violence as a coping mechanism to get over all the other crap they’ve got in their lives. So demonising men and making them feel worse about themselves is not going to solve the problem…

So when I sat down over a coffee to read Amy McQuire’s recent article in the Guardian, I could scarcely believe it. A young feminist trotting out similar apologism for violence by Indigenous men.

Her article was a response to my public condemnation of silence and inaction over the epidemic of domestic violence in Indigenous communities. Headlined ‘If you think Aboriginal women are silent about domestic violence, you’re not listening’, half her article was actually devoted, not to domestic violence, but to the sufferings of perpetrators. She quoted 1992 statistics that 40 per cent of men who’d died in custody were from the Stolen Generation; and research indicating most violent Indigenous offenders had PTSD and that incarceration rates could be due to a history of traumatic stressors passed through generations. She said youth detention produces traumatised adults who unleash anger; she linked violence to intergenerational trauma and communities’ control ‘ripped away from them’. She warned ‘simply demonising Aboriginal men in the media, doesn’t help Aboriginal women and children. In fact, it makes it worse’. But it was this that had me choking on my coffee:

To simplify a very complicated area, Aboriginal family violence is very different from domestic violence within non-Indigenous communities. It comes from a different place, from a different history, and therefore, will require different solutions.

In McQuire’s worldview, Indigenous perpetrators and victims are different from everyone else. The mainstream criminal justice system, with its incarceration and ‘punishment’, produces more violence and doesn’t work, for Indigenous offenders or victims. Most Indigenous offenders deserve pity. It follows that violence against Indigenous women should be treated more leniently than violence against other women.

This worldview relies on a premise that Indigenous men are programmed by history, our life experiences, even those of our ancestors’, to be violent abusers.

Reality check. All Indigenous Australians are colonised peoples. All of us have experienced intergenerational trauma and racism. I certainly have, especially living under the Aborigines Protection Act until I was 13; my father over half his life. I grew up with Aboriginal men like him. Strong men. Proud fighters, workers and providers who never hit women no matter what troubles in their lives. They suffered more racism than any Indigenous person under 40 will ever suffer.

The argument that jail breeds other problems isn’t new, nor limited to Indigenous offenders. And victims of abuse and violence are overly represented in all prison populations. But the reverse isn’t true. Most victims don’t become offenders. Even amid an Indigenous violence epidemic, most Indigenous men aren’t violent. Most aren’t abusers. But those who are should face the same consequences as others. And Indigenous victims deserve the same justice.

My statements on Indigenous violence generated much refutation and finger pointing. None addressed Jacinta Price’s observations that traditional culture accepts violence; on ‘promised brides’; using customary law as a defence for child rape; or women avoiding certain roads during ceremony lest they be killed as punishment for accidentally coming across a ceremonial party. None addressed Suzanne Ingram’s view that Indigenous women are pressured to prioritise racial solidarity over speaking about domestic abuse, and so now tolerate disproportionate rates of violence. None addressed the litany of reports on child abuse and family violence documenting community leaders turning a blind eye, adults not intervening, communities protecting perpetrators, victims fearing retribution, families who report abuse being blocked from housing controlled by Indigenous organisations and women pressured not to talk to enquiries. I’ve sat on enquiries and seen it myself.

Family violence isn’t tied to communities losing control. Many communities referred to in these reports are administered by Indigenous-controlled organisations. I’m under no illusions as to the criminal justice system’s ability to fix family violence. In the non-Indigenous world, where McQuire imagines the system is relevant, the system has been pathetic. The resolve by Australian authorities and society to tackle family violence is relatively recent. Even now the system fails.

What sits at the core of the Indigenous violence epidemic isn’t racism or colonisation, but communities and families not functioning as they should. Intergenerational trauma is better described as the cycle of family violence.

It’s not enough to jail offenders. It’s not even enough to provide shelters. Punishment and shelter are responses, not prevention. Ultimately, McQuire offered no solutions. But here are a few of mine.

Violence won’t end without zero tolerance for violence by families and communities, regardless of what the law or lore used to say. If a culture tolerates violence it needs to change, as other cultures have done. Violence won’t end if communities are dysfunctional, if leadership wields power for personal gain, if people abuse drugs and alcohol. Violence won’t end if parents don’t take care of their children, including by sending them to school. Violence won’t end if Indigenous adults languish on welfare and don’t work. Welfare is state-sponsored disadvantage. A job supports self-worth and autonomy. Violence won’t end by throwing money at complex webs of overlapping, untested programs. If programs aren’t demonstrated to work by the outcomes they deliver, de-fund them, reallocate funding and keep testing programs until we find those that do work. Indigenous family violence comes from the same place as all other family violence – the hands of the offenders. I’m sick of people peddling excuses for men who rape and kill and bash and maim women and children, whether those men are white or black.

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