Australia Shocked by Case of Raped Indigenous Girl
SYDNEY, Australia, Tuesday, Dec. 11 — Australia has been rocked by the case of a 10-year-old indigenous girl who was gang raped in her home community, and the revelation that her nine rapists had not been given prison sentences, in part because the judge found that the victim “probably agreed” to have sex.
The case has prompted a bout of national introspection after it has emerged that the court’s leniency was only one of many institutional failures toward the victim.
“I’m disgusted and appalled by the reports that I’ve seen,” the newly elected prime minister, Kevin Rudd, said Monday. “I am horrified by cases like this, involving sexual violence against women and children. My attitude is one of zero tolerance.”
The case has also refocused national attention on the longstanding unresolved problems within Australia’s indigenous communities and the ineffectiveness of government attempts to address them, particularly in the troubled Cape York peninsula on Australia’s northeastern tip, where the rapes took place.
“The picture emerging from the gang rape is of a bureaucratic culture that accepts a lesser standard of rights and responsibilities for indigenous people on Cape York,” the newspaper The Australian, which first reported the story on Monday, said in an editorial Tuesday.
The rapes took place in April 2006 in the remote Aboriginal coastal community of Aurukun.
In the last two months, nine people have pleaded guilty in the case.In October, in a court in Aurukun, six teenagers, all minors at the time of the offence, were sentenced to 12 months of probation, and the court decreed that no criminal conviction should be recorded.
In early November, the other three — ages 17, 18 and 26 — were given six-month suspended sentences in a court in the district capital, Cairns. The 26-year-old, Raymond Woolla, already had been listed on the Australian National Child Offence Register after being convicted of other child- sex offences.
“If you get into any more trouble in the next year, you could end up in jail,” District Court Judge Sarah Bradley told Woolla in her sentencing statement.
Ms. Bradley has defended her actions, telling The Australian that she thought the sentences were “appropriate” given that the prosecutor had not asked for custodial sentences to be imposed.
Despite the fact that under Australian law, a 10-year-old is too young to give informed consent, the court found there were mitigating circumstances.
“The girl involved was not forced, and she probably agreed to have sex with all of you,” Ms. Bradley said in her judgment.
The Australian reported Tuesday that the case first came to light when the girl went to the clinic in Aurukun asking for condoms and a pregnancy test, and it was discovered that she had contracted gonorrhoea.
Since the news of the case broke, the government of Queensland state, where the offence occurred, has scrambled to rectify the situation.
Anna Bligh. the premier of Queensland State, which includes Cape York, has ordered a review of every sentence handed down in sexual assault cases in the Cape York area in the last two years.
Kerry Shine, the attorney general for Queensland, issued a statement Monday saying that he would try to appeal the sentences, but that since the 28-day period that state law allows for the appeal has expired, he would have to ask the Court of Appeal to have the period extended.
But the institutional failures run deeper than the leniency of the courts. The child at the center of the case is developmentally disabled, having been born with foetal alcohol syndrome, and she was first sexually assaulted when she was seven years old, when she contracted syphilis.
The Australian reported that she was placed in a number of foster homes, eventually ending up with a non-indigenous family, and although she had been progressing well in her new home, social workers who believed that indigenous children should not be placed with non- indigenous families moved her back to Aurukun, where she was assaulted.
After a report by the Queensland Department of Child Safety a year ago, one senior social worker has been fired and two others suspended.
Like many Aboriginal communities, there is a tortured history of distrust between the people of Aurukun and state and federal institutions. There have been at least three riots there this year, set off both by accusations of police brutality and by clashes between family groups.
The problems in Aurukun and Cape York more generally have prompted calls by state opposition politicians for intervention by the federal government similar to its intervention in the neighboring Northern Territory earlier this year.
The intervention followed a report by the territory government that found evidence of widespread child neglect and abuse, fuelled by what the report called “rivers of grog.” The federal action significantly curtailed the rights of many Aborigines to spend their benefit payments freely and to restrict their access to alcohol and pornography.
The Labor government, which took power earlier this month, supported the intervention when it was in opposition, but has signalled that it intends to change some of its more highly criticized aspects.
But the federal government was only able to intervene in the Northern Territory because of a quirk of the constitution. The Territory does not have the full rights of statehood, unlike Queensland, making the intervention easier.
And even those who want the federal government to intervene concede that such an action would only be a temporary stopgap measure amd acknowledge that Australia is still a long way from finding a way to support indigenous identity while providing the full benefits and protections provided to the rest of society.
