There is a crisis within the crisis, named in Royal Commissions and Coroners’ reports for decades. Successive governments have ignored it. Andrew Brown continues his series on domestic violence.
Indigenous women are just over 3% of the Australian population. Yet, they account for 62% of all hospitalisations for family and domestic violence. Read that ratio slowly. Three per cent of the population. Sixty-two per cent of the hospitalisations. Indigenous women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised due to violence than non-Indigenous women, and six times more likely to die from it.
In central Australia, the hospitalisation rate rises to 95 times.
These numbers did not emerge from nowhere. They are the accumulated weight of what this country has done to its First Nations people, and what it continues to do.
Before colonisation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities governed themselves. Their laws and kinship structures had been built over tens of thousands of years. Colonisation dismantled them. What replaced them was a patriarchy that stripped Aboriginal men of status and economic agency and
handed the resulting trauma to the same institutions that had caused it.
Patrick Dodson has long argued that colonisation systematically undermined the role and status of Aboriginal men, destroying the structures through which identity and family life were formed. The dislocation did not disappear. It moved through families and became what researchers call intergenerational trauma, and what communities simply call their reality.
Intergenerational trauma
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, colonisation continues to cause harm. Dispossession, cultural dislocation, foreign gender hierarchies, and the forced removal of children have produced trauma directly linked to increased rates of family violence. This is not a fringe academic position. It is documented across decades of research, coronial findings, and royal commission testimony.
Yiman and Bundjalung woman Carlie Atkinson, co-founder of We Al-li, has put it directly. “Intergenerational trauma stems from the brutal conditions our old people lived through,” she said. “It stems from the fear of being separated from Country and community, from
the colonisation and oppression of our people and then the denial of that.
The violence in Indigenous communities today cannot be separated from the violence the state inflicted across generations. To address one without acknowledging the other is not a policy position. It is a studied ignorance.
Professor Marcia Langton has called what is happening “a sick situation, an unacceptable situation, severely perverted.” She is not describing a cultural pathology. She is describing the consequences of what was done to culture.
Violence is not a product of Aboriginal identity. It is a product of what colonisation did to identity, men, families, and the structures that once held communities together.
Institutionalised discrimination
Then there is the institution problem. The police, courts, child protection agencies, and health services meant to provide safety are the same institutions many Aboriginal women have every reason to fear. Indigenous child removal in this country has been called a second Stolen Generation.
In Victoria, which presents itself as leading the nation on gendered violence, 2024 data showed more than one in ten Aboriginal children had been removed from their families. The national average is half that.
A woman who calls the police about violence in her home is not just reporting a crime. She is risking her children being taken. That calculation is not irrational. It is the reality of what seeking help from the state has historically meant for Aboriginal families. The system asks these women to trust the very institutions that spent generations destroying them.
Coroner Elisabeth Armitage’s November 2024 inquest examined the deaths of four Aboriginal women: Kumarn Rubuntja, Kumanjayi Haywood, Miss Yunupingu and Ngeygo Ragurrk. Each had sought help. Each killer was known to police.
Each was failed by the same system her ancestors had every reason to fear.
There is a further cruelty in some of the legal reforms being celebrated as progress. When New South Wales criminalised coercive control as a standalone offence in 2024, it was presented as a landmark step. However, First Nations women were among its sharpest critics.
They warned the law would result in further incarceration of Indigenous women, not their protection. Laws written without Indigenous women at the centre will be used against Indigenous women by a system with a long history of doing exactly that.
The answer
The answers to this crisis already exist in the communities experiencing it. Antoinette Braybrook has led Djirra, Victoria’s Aboriginal family violence legal service, for more than two decades.
“Aboriginal women are not and have not been silent,” she said at the 2023 National Reconciliation Week Oration. “We have been silenced, disbelieved, and our lives not valued. Are you listening?” On what is blocking change, she is equally direct: “Our voices, our solutions, and our truth-telling have been ignored by successive governments and decision-makers. All the while, governments and the systems that report to them continue to implement punitive and racist responses.”
Programs like Djirra’s Koori Women’s Place workshops, which use cultural connection as a protective factor, and the Men Supporting Men program run by Ebenezer Aboriginal Corporation, are locally designed, community-controlled responses that fit the context they operate in.
They are not pilots, but proven models. Yet, they are
chronically underfunded for the scale of what they are asked to address.
Malarndirri McCarthy, the federal Minister for Indigenous Australians, has carriage of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Action Plan. It invested $13.995m across 25 community-controlled organisations. Against a national domestic violence budget exceeding $4B, and against hospitalisation rates that exceed the national average by a factor of 34, that number is not a commitment. It is a gesture.
The Closing the Gap target is to reduce family violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children by 50% by 2031. Current data collection is insufficient to measure progress toward that target. The government does not know whether things are getting better or worse because it has not built the tools to find out. It set a deadline, announced it publicly, and never built the means to verify it.
This is what treating a crisis as a line item looks like. You fund it just enough to claim you are funding it. You set targets without the means to measure them. You commission reports and ignore them. “Promises will not save women’s lives,” Braybrook said. “Action will.”
The women inside the gap between announcement and reality have names. They are owed more than a target.