On a high-school trip to Central Australia in the early 1980s, we paid a visit to a camel farm. The cameleer was very an old-school Territorian bushie, all leathery skin, beard and no-bullshit attitude. When someone asked about Aboriginal culture, his answer shocked all of us. “A lot of people’ll try and tell you how wonderful Aboriginal culture, but they don’t want to talk about young girls being forced to marry older men, or be speared by their families”.
What shocked me at the time was what seemed to me then to be such unbridled racism. Looking back, though, what I should really have been shocked about was that such a brutal culture as he described should not only persist into the 20th century but actually be celebrated by so many people who’d never experienced it.
As Jacinta Nampijinpa Price argues, such white blindness is still the rule in many circles – even as Aboriginal women and children are enduring extraordinary suffering under the rubric of “traditional culture”.
As The BFD has already reported, Aboriginal women and especially children are shockingly over-represented in domestic violence and homicides. Aboriginal women and children are 15 times more likely to be victims than other Australians. Yet, the very NGOs and bureaucrats who are paid millions by taxpayers to help the Aboriginal victims of domestic violence steadfastly refuse to speak the simple truth that old cameleer bluntly shocked us with.
Research by ANROWS [Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety] disputes the overwhelming findings that customary law and cultural influences — in particular traditional “men’s business” — are significant drivers in indigenous violence against women. Instead the organisation suggests the “historical impacts of colonisation” are to blame. This exonerates violent offenders but, sadly, is a conclusion shared by many publicly funded organisations out to tackle indigenous family violence.
Our Watch is another organisation promoting this view, which perpetuates the narrative that Aboriginal perpetrators of violence are themselves victims of the brutality of colonisation and therefore cannot take full responsibility for their actions.
Such conclusions are not reflective of the experience of we Aboriginal women who have survived within the confines of traditional Aboriginal culture. Those of us who have lived our lives on traditional cultural terms have first-hand knowledge of the cultural drivers of family violence.
It’s not as if the truth isn’t plainly there for these feminist bureaucracies to see if they were to bother. Even if they’re going to ignore what Aboriginal victims of violence are telling them, they need only crack open a book on “customary law”.
One has only to look up the book on Ngarra Law to understand not only how traditional Yolngu law accepts violence against women — and make no mistake: this is common for many Aboriginal groups.
The following quote can be found under the chapter titled Marriage Law of the Ngarra Law written by Yolngu elders: “When a promised bride has reached sexual maturity her promised husband may take her for his wife. A 40 or 50-year-old man has spent his life learning the Ngarra law. His new wife might only be 13 to 16 years old and she will be sexually mature but she will not know much about the law. Yet when she marries him, she has the right to learn from him all the law that he knows that took him a lifetime to learn. But if she breaks the marriage law she must be speared through the leg. If the husband does not want to punish her then her mother or brother or sister will punish her, perhaps by hitting her with a heavy nulla nulla.”
Read that again, if your mouth isn’t already hanging open.
Yet, the same feminists who erupt in foaming outrage if a white judge strays from the feminist “believe women” narrative, blithely ignore Aboriginal “law men” who openly advocate spearing or bashing underage girls with clubs if they refuse to have sex with old men.
Not a single taxpayer-funded organisation designed to tackle Aboriginal family violence, violence against women or child abuse in Aboriginal communities has taken umbrage with the writings found within the Ngarra Law book.
theaustralian.com.au/commentary/culture-to-blame-for-much-of-indigenous-family-violence/
The (overwhelmingly left-leaning) NGOs and bureaucrats who deliberately ignore the rape and beating of underage girls in Aboriginal communities must be treated with the same contempt and disgust as the social workers, police and politicians who enabled the industrial-scale rape of underage girls in Britain by gangs of Muslim men.
It seems that rapists and brutalisers of little girls can always count on getting a free pass from the left, just so long as they’re the “right” skin colour or religion.