Paternalism, thy name is Howard

I’ve been reluct­ant to com­ment on the Howard gov­ern­ment’s decision to “tackle” child abuse in remote indi­gen­ous com­munit­ies in the North­ern ter­rit­ory of Aus­tralia as I haven’t been there. Part of my hes­it­a­tion is that I do believe there is rampant, pos­sibly instituion­al­ized child abuse in indi­gen­ous com­munit­ies, in sim­ilar ways that there is in many other com­munit­ies where “child brides” are con­sidered accept­able and girls are con­sidered to have reached matur­ity at their menses. I do think this is a ter­rible thing and I do believe that the adult women in those com­munit­ies have asked for help in halt­ing this ongo­ing and self-per­petu­at­ing (abusees are more likely to become abusers) tradition.

I’ve found the cov­er­age awful, espe­cially with kick­ers like this “in depth” piece (the art­icle itself is an OK his­tory, as far as I can see). Howard, the stun­ted creep, is call­ing the inva­sion of indi­gen­ous com­munit­ies with the mil­it­ary “our Hur­ricane Kat­rina” while appar­ently fam­il­ies are flee­ing his well-mean­ing rescue troops. Does­n’t sound much like the same sort of thing at all. Well, except for the racism and lack of under­stand­ing of a com­munity by an elec­ted offi­cial. But enough back­story for our North­ern readers.

This post is promp­ted by a friend who is a police officer with one of the Aus­tralian State Police forces. I won’t men­tion her by name here, partly because she locked her post, pre­sum­ably to pro­tect her job, and partly because I have no interest in giving the stalk­ers the sat­is­fac­tion of track­ing down another of my con­tacts and libel­ing me. She just posted an amaz­ing delib­er­a­tion on the lack of real inform­a­tion avail­able even to her on troop and force deploy­ment, her con­cerns about the num­bers of adequately trained sexual abuse coun­selors in the deploy­ment given the num­bers Aus­tralia-wide, and the fact that in no other com­munity is anyone forced to report sexual abuse or pro­sec­ute it, even in dis­ad­vant­aged urban com­munit­ies where there is adequate post-arrest coun­sel­ing for the families. 

I think this just rein­forces for me that Howard is doing yet another of his mid-elec­tion year scams and I’m furi­ous with him. If it works *again*, I’ll be even more furi­ous with the Aus­tralian popu­lace that votes for him.