Playing the culture card and losing

Kimm’s patent goof is that she conflates culture with sexual violence. If we apply the same flaky logic when thinking about child molesting priests, we could argue that child rape was intrinsic to the Catholic way of life. What a harebrained idea!

So while Devine and Neill respond to the “cultural defence” with censure, they invalidate themselves by constructing sexual violence as a cultural problem. To accept that Indigenous culture explains the violence is to deal the perpetrators a perfect hand. So why such shock when it’s played?

Janet Albrechtsen, in a similar blunder, frets that political correctness and cultural rights will allow offenders to “hide behind claims of culture when committing egregious crimes”.

This cannot be, since neither cultural rights nor political correctness can protect sex offenders because sexual violence isn’t part of culture.

Not so for Albrechtsen who, to argue with such conviction that “rights culture” will lead to an increase of Indigenous children being abused, must implicitly accept that sexual violence is part of Indigenous culture and has causal power in cases of child abuse.

One of Australia's astute legal minds, James McConvill Senior Lecturer at La Trobe School of Law, recently stated in On Line Opinion:

There is one sure-fired way to deal with the dreadful conditions within Aboriginal communities in Northern Australia - the forced removal of Aboriginal children.

It is unfortunate that we have allowed this clear and simple fact to be overshadowed by the political correctness engineered by the bleeding hearts of the Left.

Dr McConvill's comment, aside from the failed historical attempt at the same, a glaring political agenda and a demonstrated ignorance of the complexities of removing children, really reinforces the argument that isolated rescues of individual children will not solve the underlying causes of violence against them.

It does not address the root causes of child abuse such as poverty, social isolation, inadequate services, poor health, substance abuse, racism, parental stress, poor parenting skills and the lack of hope for the future - or a future to hope for at all.

It is only logical to see violence as a predictable manifestation in such circumstances and in light of Indigenous histories, those are blatantly obvious.

We cannot hope to reduce and prevent child sexual assault in Indigenous communities, or any community, if our attention is misdirected. We cannot prevent it by attacking the left or engaging in political hysteria. The time has come to attend to the root causes, instead of just the consequences, of child sexual abuse.

All the huffing and puffing, forced removal and moral outrage in the world is not going to stop the next Indigenous child from being abused unless we identify and manage the reasons behind the offending.