Both our political class and Indigenous communities have failed troubled Aboriginal young people in Northern Australia

The shooting death of Kumanjayi Walker in the remote Northern Territory town of Yuendumu was instructive in many ways.  To most people the telling aspect of his sad lifewas that he was in danger from the time he was a baby.  This led him to sustain injury while still in the womb, and become embedded in a criminal lifestyle before even his teenage years.

He had all the disadvantages you could imagine, yet the authorities and his Aboriginal community largely ignored his predicament.

His mother was a “sniffer”, who drank heavily while pregnant.  He was given away shortly after birth and grew up in an environment of alcohol abuse and severe domestic violence.  There were community concerns that he was not thriving as a baby, that the home he was living in was "filthy", and that he suffered from ear and chest infections, nits, and scabies.  As a child he was moved around between families, and (at school) was categorised as a "special needs" student.

Walker began committing break-ins when he was 11.  By age 12 he was considered to be a “dysfunctional child with poor impulse control and inability to control his emotions”.  There were concerns about his cognitive function due to his “prolonged exposure to domestic violence”, and it was suspected that Walker may have suffered frontal lobe damage as a result of his biological mother’s petrol-sniffing.  His guardians struggled to control him, and he had a problem with anger management.  He frequently wagged school, and by age 13, regularly drank alcohol and smoked cannabis daily.

He reportedly would steal spray cans from adults in Yuendumu to inhale the petrol, paint or deodorant that he was addicted to, despite saying they “made him feel dizzy and hurt his brain”.

At age 13 his behaviour escalated to a new level.  He broke into buildings, damaged property and vandalised vehicles.  In April 2014 he broke into and trashed the Yuendumu Medical Clinic and the newly built early childhood learning centre, causing an estimated $130,000 of damage.  He was suspected of other crimes and was regularly seen wandering around the community late at night.  After dozens of episodes stealing cars, damaging property and fighting with other youths, he acquired a girlfriend, but began bashing her.  The tale just goes on.

The lesson is that the die for Walker was cast early in life.  Poor parenting meant that he was destined for a troubled criminal life before he was even a teenager.  Little was ever done to divert him from this path.

The majority of Indigenous families are not like that, but there still are a large number of communities and individual families where there are inter-generational problems in bringing up children (the stereotypical viscous circle).  I recently returned from a holiday in Far North Queensland, where many complained about crime by out-of-control Indigenous teenagers, with car theft, malicious damage, assault, and burglary being stand-out problems.

Research also highlights "astronomical crime rates" for non-urban communities with a 50 per cent or more Indigenous population.  Alarmingly, in some remote areas, domestic violence and assault far outstrip all other crimes.

We are now at the stage where there is both an official narrative and a (somewhat less prominent) dissenting view.

Therecently released Family and Community Safety for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (FaCtS) Study was undertaken by the Australian National University for the Department of Social Services.

A key conclusion was that "(Indigenous)community members overwhelmingly viewed family and community violence as a by-product of colonisation        That included intergenerational trauma, driven by removal from country and family separations, with inadequate capacity to address it.      It is also critical to take account of the role of the broader context and system in generating violence, and to expect that system to take responsibility for reducing [it]."

In other words we are being told that it is "the system" and not Aboriginal people that needs to take responsibility for community violence.

A dissenting view has been put by Indigenous politician Jacinta Price.

She argues that, "if Aboriginal people are to successfully address the high rates of intrapersonal violence in Aboriginal communities, they need to acknowledge the real causes of this violence.  This means not excusing perpetrators’ behaviour by blaming the victims and/or colonisation, but taking a long hard look at the aspects of Aboriginal culture that need to change.     In traditional Aboriginal culture everyone, boys and girls, learned to fight.........I know that it is a culture that accepts violence".

She further argues that "if we are to believe that intra-generational trauma exists, then Aboriginal people have been experiencing it within our culture for over 40,000 years. Because, even before the British came to our shores, life was extremely hard and violence was a fundamental part of life........It seems truth is not what Aboriginal units in universities are interested in, but rather ideology and popular opinion expressed through social media.....The way forward has to be a unified effort; not an ‘us and them’ approach but an open and honest journey together".

(Aboriginal) youth crime is known to be a "massive" issue in Northern Australia.  Razor-wire fences, and community shops encased in steel plates are a not uncommon in high crime areas.  Darwin and Townsville are said to be amongst the worst locations in the world (ranked 56 and 62 respectively) in terms of crime.  Crime in these cities and in remote areas is interlinked with welfare dependency and low school attendance rates.  Recent data on school attendance in the Northern Territory reveals that only a third of Indigenous children are attending school on most days.

The rate of imprisonment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people in the Northern Territory is 43 times the rate for non-Indigenous, while nationally the imprisonment rate is 17 times that for non-Indigenous.  In order to reduce imprisonment rates for Indigenous youth, "progressives" want laws changed so children cannot be sent to detention/jail before they turn 14, despite the obvious fact that many young offenders have become hardened criminals by their early teens.

Raising the age of criminal responsibility would reduce imprisonment rates but also will mean that offending has few consequences.  The Australian Capital Territory has already begun work on changing its laws with some other jurisdictions following.

The underlying issue is whether the existing legal and criminal justice system is unfair or whether it is merely reflecting a high level of offending by Indigenous young people.  If the latter, are there underlying causal issues contributing to offending, that are not being addressed?

The key suspect (rarely highlighted by politicians) would have to be poor parenting (driven by family breakdown, unemployment, welfare dependency, substance abuse, and the lack of an education culture).

There is evidence that much of Indigenous society in Australia suffers issues of absent fathers, high levels of illegitimacy, substance abuse (including poor tolerance of alcohol), and inadequate child supervision.

According to the 2016 Census, most (79 per cent) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people live in one-family households.  Of such families, only 41 per cent were couple families with children, and 22 per cent were couple families with no children.  A full 34 per cent were single parent families.  For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander multi-family households, 44 per cent were one parent families.  The majority of lone parents in these households were female (85 per cent), and most had never married (60 per cent).

It is suggested (by many Aboriginal people themselves) that some Aboriginal communities (especially in remote areas) have broken down.  To end the cycle of dysfunction some spokespeople suggest a need for law and order, limiting access to alcohol, a need to teach parenthood, and placing children into functional families.  The very high proportion of single mother families in Aboriginal society is suggestive of a rate of births outside marriage, that is almost certainly greater than that affecting African-American families in the US.

A lot of policy failures in this area can be attributed to the false narrative concerning Australia's so called "stolen generations".  The reality is that nearly all Indigenous children, that were removed from their families or placed in institutions in the past, were either given up by their families or removed because they were assessed as "in danger".  The false claim that up to 100,000 were stolen has had the unfortunate effect of making today's authorities very reluctant to take measures in cases of neglected Indigenous children, lest they be accused of repeating historic "child stealing" and alleged genocide.  At the same time poorly functioning Indigenous communities and extended families are often not in a position to adequately intervene either.

It is time for Indigenous communities themselves to force the issue, and widely address individual cases of neglect.  (This, however, is probably too much to expect from the worst affected communities.)  Failing this, it should be up to Government authorities to act.  The problem is that ideology, political cowardice, and false historical narratives all fall in the way, so that generational problems of child neglect in troubled Indigenous communities are destined to continue.