On regional and cultural approaches to Australian Indigenous violence.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 August 2010
• Author: Memmott, Paul

Based on a national analysis of Indigenous family violence, the 2001 monograph on 'Violence in Indigenous Communities' by the author and his colleagues for the Australian Attorney-General's Department called for government agencies to 'take a regional approach to supporting and co-ordinating local community initiatives' together with 'partnerships between Indigenous program personnel and mainstream services ...' (Memmott et al., 2001, p. 4).This current article reports on regional aspects of two subsequent pieces of research by the author, one in the Barkly Region of central-east Northern Territory for Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation (2007) and the other in the Torres Strait for the Queensland Department of Communities (2008). The research findings from both of these studies develop the case for government policy to accommodate regional approaches to Indigenous family violence due to combinations of geographic and culturally specific causal factors. The importance of nurturing social and cultural capital in Indigenous communities to strengthen social values, leadership and cohesion in addressing Indigenous violence will be emphasised. Some comment will be made on the role of underlying factors ('deep historical circumstances') in contributing to violence, in conjunction with precipitating causes and situational factors, the former being somewhat downplayed in policy debate over the period of the Howard government.

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Although Indigenous family violence has become an increasingly disturbing social problem in Australia during recent decades (Sutton, 2009, p. 106-9), there have been only a modest number of empirical analyses of the complex and dynamic causal factors underlying the problem. This article emphasises the value of a sociogeographic approach to problem analysis and response design. It reinforces the need for government agencies to 'take a regional approach to supporting and co-ordinating local community initiatives' together with 'partnerships between Indigenous program personnel and mainstream services ...' (Memmott et al., 2001, p. 4). This article reports on regional aspects of two recent pieces of consultancy research by the author, one in the Barkly Region of central-east Northern Territory for Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation (Paul Memmott & Associates [PMA], 2007) and the other in the Torres Strait region for the Queensland Department of Communities (PMA, 2008). Profiles of these two remote regions are used to develop the case for government policy to accommodate regional and community-based approaches to Indigenous family violence due to combinations of geographic and culturally specific causal factors. Finally, the significance of nurturing social and cultural capital in Indigenous communities to strengthen social values, social cohesion and leadership in addressing Indigenous violence is emphasised.

Background and Context to the Two Studies

Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation (AHAC) is an Aboriginal Medical Service based in Tennant Creek and services the Yapakurlangu or Barkly Region of the central-east Northern Territory. From within Anyinginyi, the Piliyintinji-ki' Stronger Family Unit was developing a range of services that provided a whole-of-family and whole-of-community approach to program delivery to improve their health and social wellbeing. Associated aims were firstly to provide individuals and families with an increased understanding of life issues and to accept control and responsibility for their lives, and secondly to enhance the capacity of Aboriginal people to define their problems, and to work with Piliyintinji-ki to develop strategies to address them.

Piliyintinji-ki staff aimed to help an individual 'get better' through seeking to support their entire family experiencing social and emotional issues associated with trauma, including grief, forced separation of children from families, sexual abuse, substance misuse, family violence and suicide. Staff and programs focused on rebuilding an individual's relationship with their family and country and thereby improving social and emotional wellbeing. Educational and prevention initiatives were recognised as fundamental to these goals, as were culturally grounded problem definitions and methods (PMA, 2007, pp. 2-3).

The author's consultancy to Anyinginyi was conducted during 2006-07, and funded by the then Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaCSIA), to develop and implement a Regional Family Violence Plan for the Barkly with a focus on activities, initiatives, services and strategies that would reduce or prevent Indigenous family violence or sexual abuse and promote child protection. A high-priority objective was to build and transfer skills and knowledge to develop the work capacity of the Piliyintinji-ki team. With an emphasis in using participatory approaches, Piliyintinji-ki staff then worked with local communities to help them assess their respective needs in preventing and addressing family violence, and implement community-based initiatives.

Whereas the Barkly consultancy required a strong emphasis on family violence worker capacity-building, albeit informed by research findings, the Torres Strait Island study only emphasised research on family violence and current service delivery; it contained no capacity-building component. The author was contracted by the Queensland Department of Communities in early 2007 to investigate the unique causes of domestic and family violence in Torres Strait cultures. The general research aim was to provide an evidence base for informing policy and service delivery for family and domestic violence prevention and early intervention in Torres Strait Islander populations. An additional key applied research question was 'What would be a geographically suited and culturally specific model of service, policy and campaign response for the Torres Strait and what range of service provision would this include?' This necessity for a regional response to family violence was a basic assumption of the Barkly consultancy.

Definition of Indigenous Family Violence

Indigenous family violence is broadly defined to encapsulate not only the extended nature of Indigenous families, but also a range of violence acts, occurring frequently between kinspeople in Indigenous communities. Family violence may involve all types of relatives; the victim and the perpetrator often have a kin relation. The term 'family' means 'extended family', which embraces a kinship network of discrete, intermarried, descent groups; while the 'community' may be remote, rural or urbanbased and its residents may live in one location or be more dispersed, but nevertheless interact and behave as a social network. The perpetrator of violence may be an individual or a group, and the victim of violence may also be an individual or a group. Some episodes of family violence are ongoing over a long period of time, one of the most prevalent examples being spousal (or domestic) violence. The acts of family violence may constitute physical, psychological, emotional, social, economic or sexual abuse, as well as suicide and self-injury (Memmott et al., 2001, p. 1). In the literature on Indigenous family violence, the overwhelming evidence supports the position that the various acts of Indigenous violence each have multiple originating and/or exacerbating causes. Memmott et al. (2001, p. 11) argued that the causal factors can be usefully considered under three categories: first, the 'catalysing' or 'precipitating' causes are the particular events that 'trigger' a violent behavioural episode by a perpetrator; second, the 'situational factors' in the social environment of the antagonist can include such aspects as substance abuse, other people encouraging one or both of the antagonists to act, and conflicting social differences between the antagonists; and third, the 'underlying factors' are the deep historical circumstances of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial Indigenous existence that place many contemporary Indigenous people in a circumstance of vulnerability, leading to their perpetrating, or becoming the victim, of violent behaviour.

This article commences with geographic profiles of the two case study regions and, in so doing, identifies specific geographic and associated economic attributes that form specific situational factors underlying family violence that are not readily encountered in metropolitan settings. This is followed by profiles of the family violence in the two regions that contain many specific cultural and historical aspects that, in combination, provide a unique challenge to designing family violence response programs.

Geographic Profile of the Barkly Region

The Barkly Region of the central-east Northern Territory consists mostly of semiarid red-sand plains, punctuated by low mountains with intermittently flowing streams that flood into uninhabited desert areas. In the north and east is a different land system, that of the Barkly Tableland consisting of grey cracking soils and open grassland downs that, combined with artesian bores, support world-class cattle grazing properties. The region is criss-crossed by two bitumen highways, the Stuart and Barkly Highways (see map in Figure 1).

Whereas the total Northern Territory population just prior to the consultancy was almost 200,000, the Barkly Region had the lowest regional population of the Northern Territory's six regions, with some 5,840 people. (2) However, of the six Northern Territory regions, Barkly was one of the largest at a little over 283,000 [kms.sup.2], and second in size only to the Central Region surrounding Alice Springs in the south. Despite the comparatively small population of the Barkly Region in 2004, it had a high proportion of Aboriginal people, some 3,220 or about 55% (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2001, 2005).

Constraints to family violence program implementation were...