It’s coming to the end of my first month in Canada and
I’ve been missing home a little, so I’m going to blog about Australia this
week. I wanted to talk about the macro context of sexual assault in Canada that
we spoke about in class in relation to Audra Simpson. Specifically, I wanted to
talk about structural violence in Australia, which has a comparable colonial
history to Canada. Sexual assault does come up, but not in the same way that
Simpson talks about it.
Enrolling in this course, I was not expecting Simpson;
the passion with which she spoke, and how readily she called out the state,
blew me away. While watching the lecture, I had to google a lot of the
references which I had never heard of, like the Highway of Tears and Cindy
Gladue’s case. To be frank, I was shocked by the existence of the Missing or
Murdered Indigenous Women. In Australia, there is no comparable ‘phenomenon’. I
am by no means an expert on Indigenous politics, but nothing as well documented
as the MMIW in Canada exists.
After walking away from our discussion class on
Simpson, my mind wandered to the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention. Simpson’s
ideas, for me, are useful in thinking about the Intervention as more than just
a racist policy. One of her main points was that through their monopoly of
legitimate violence, states will seek to get rid of competing claims to sovereignty.
Though I have not come across a similar articulation of the threat to the state
that Indigenous women in Canada embody, Indigenous people in Australia do represent
a threat to state sovereignty with differing social structures to white society
and, of course, prior claims to the land.
Simpson’s ideas and our discussion helped me to see
that the legislation mandating the Intervention is unquestionably a form of
structural violence. To give some context to the Intervention, parliament had
to suspend the Racial Discrimination Act
to get the implementing legislation through. A variety of measures, such as
income management, compulsory property management and the scrapping of
employment programs were introduced with no community consultation. Despite
multiple changes of government, some aspects of Intervention still remain in
place, and a statistics suggest quality of life has either decreased or
remained stagnant for Indigenous Australians.
While this is not structural violence through a state
policy of violent indifference that Simpson spoke on, the Intervention was a method
of suppressing Indigenous communities which are a potential threat to state
sovereignty. Perhaps just as the Canadian state requires the disappearance of
Indigenous women, the Australian state needs to control the quality and style
of life in Indigenous communities for its continued existence as a legitimate
sovereign entity. Simpson’s keynote and ideas of structural violence have
helped me rethink the Intervention as more than just a racist policy, but an
aspect of ongoing state violence to maintain political legitimacy.
(On a side note, the government launched the
Intervention in response to the ‘Little Children Are Sacred’ Report. Briefly,
it claimed child sexual abuse was a widespread issue in Indigenous communities,
and could be attributed to a breakdown of Aboriginal culture and society and
made recommendations (none of which were implemented). This reminded me of an
idea raised in ‘Dangerous Intersections’. Sexual colonisation continues today,
and as a result perpetrators of colour are often subject to disproportionate public
attention and scrutiny – in this case, the Intervention. Obviously, there are
no interventions into suburbia, where the majority of the population is white,
to deal with child sexual abuse.)
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