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

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.