Deathscapes

Targeting of Indigenous Women 2f - Disproportionately targeted

Deathscapes

Disproportionately targeted: Australia

Excerpt from the poem 'Double Threat' by Melanie Mununggurr-Williams, it reads 'I'm born with a target on my back / It's a target of default / simply because I'm born Black...'. Behind the text are two red target symbols.

[imagecaption] Melanie Mununggurr-Williams – Australian Poetry Slam Champion, ‘Double Threat‘, 2018. Video: Australian Poetry Slam. [/imagecaption]

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  • Research into the mortality of mothers between 1983 and 2010 by the Centre for Research Excellence in Aboriginal Health and Well-being found that Aboriginal mothers were about 17.5 times more likely to die from homicide than non-Aboriginal mothers. The study also found that Aboriginal women ‘had higher rates of death due to external causes and higher rates in the sub-categories of accident, suicide and homicide than other women’ (2016, 461). The exceptional mortality rates of mothers in turn carries a range of grave implications for Aboriginal children’s health and wellbeing.
  • Based on Australia’s 2014-15 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey [NATSISS], 63% of Indigenous women who had experienced physical violence reported that the perpetrator of the most recent incident was a family member, including a current or former partner. During the same period, Indigenous women were 32 times more likely to be hospitalised due to family violence than non-Indigenous women. In citing these statistics, we also strongly emphasise that the perpetrators of family violence were not necessarily Indigenous men, as is sometimes erroneously assumed.
  • According to the 2016 the Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] recorded data on victims of crime, Indigenous people in Australia were up to 3.4 times as likely to be the victims of sexual assault than non-Indigenous Australians across the  jurisdictions of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory (AIHW, 2018).


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This research was primarily supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme from 2016-2020.

Partial funding was received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Partnership Development Grants scheme in 2016-2017.

The views expressed herein are those of the named authors and are not necessarily those of the funders.

All content © artists and deathscapes.org, 2017.

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