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March 07, 2007
Louis Nowra has an article in the Australian Literary Review about male violence and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities. He says:
In 2005 I spent several days in the Alice Springs hospital after falling ill while attending a friend's wedding ..... What disturbed me...was that the most common sight in the hospital was Aboriginal women and girls with severe injuries suffered during domestic violence. Some of their faces looked as though an incompetent butcher had conducted plastic surgery with a hammer and saw. The fear in their eyes reminded me of dogs whipped into cringing submission. The confronting evidence of what men had done to the women was almost unbearable.
He adds that:
The Alice Springs hospital provides a clear example: about 800 Aboriginal women were treated for domestic assault last year, up from 351 in 1999. The rate of domestic assault in indigenous communities is eight to 10 times that of non-indigenous communities and the sexual abuse of girls is so widespread that one-third of 13-year-old girls in the NT are infected with chlamydia and gonorrhoea. In fact, the situation has become a calamity.
Customary law has been used to justify this violence and sexual abuse in the courts. In May last year, Marcia Langton, an indigenous professor at the University of Melbourne, spoke for many women when she asked: "Are the Aboriginal legal services which supposedly work for us ever going to stop arguing that rape is traditional law?"
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