Through Black Eyes

A Handbook of Family Violence in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities

INTRODUCTION

In February 1989 the Secretariat of the National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC) convened a national conference in Canberra on domestic violence. At the conference, SNAICC was nominated to carry out a nationwide campaign on domestic violence and to produce this handbook and three posters which carried the themes ‘Domestic Violence – Not Our Way’ and ‘Child Sexual Abuse – Not Our Way’. The aim of the campaign was not only to promote community awareness of the issues but was to be seen as an immediate short-term response to the seemingly increasing incidents of family violence and child sexual abuse being reported by AICCAs and AICCA-type agencies throughout the country.

One difficulty in putting this book together was deciding who the target group would be. Should it be a handbook specifically aimed at workers, the victims or everyone? From the start of research it became apparent that people felt family violence was a Community problem and therefore everyone in our Communities – men, women and children – needed to be made aware of the issues and to be involved in the search for solutions. It then became important to make the language in this handbook as simple as possible so that it was accessible to as many people as possible.

With limited time, as well as finances, it has been impossible to visit every Community to hear every story, but what follows is a fairly general account of the way many of us feel about family violence and child sexual abuse today. For instance, many women do not want their men to go to jail, but they do want the violence to stop and they want their men to take up responsibility for the problem. Our men, on the other hand, feel they have been left out of the family violence issue and always seen in a negative light as the ‘perpetrator’, the ‘abuser’, with no resources or support services to help them cope with their problems. Other thoughts expressed in this handbook are for our kids: how do they cope? Although many of us believe kids will always bounce back when confronted by family violence, this is just not true. Our kids are just not coping; this has prompted SNAICC to put together this handbook.

Family violence is widespread in our Communities. While it appears to be on the increase information tells us that this increase is due to the growing number of people who are beginning to report incidences of abuse. It has become important to talk about family violence, to open all the closed doors, to change the attitudes and dispel the myths that have for so long kept many of our people in the dark and alone. We hope Through Black Eyes is a positive start to doing just that.

My own hopes for this handbook are a hundredfold: that it serves as an introduction to the issues of family violence and child sexual abuse in our Communities, that it stirs in us a need to do something about these problems as individuals and as Communities. I also hope it helps Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers to understand and cope with the problems they are faced with in their field of work. For non-Aboriginal and Islander workers I hope this handbook gives some understanding of our culture and the problems we face.

For the many victims, who are mainly women, the courage to stand up for themselves. For the men who ultimately are victims, too, the confidence and strength to help save their families. Finally for our kids, a little bit of hope that things can only be better for their future.