Conflict, Politics and Crime by Chris Cunneen

Author:Chris Cunneen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781741150216
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2010-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

7

Policing Indigenous women

The relationship between Indigenous women and police intersects with processes of both colonisation and gender. There are commonalities in the way Indigenous women are treated by police with the way other women are treated, particularly where they share backgrounds of socioeconomic disadvantage and cultural and ethnic difference from the dominant society. As Alder (1995) has noted, how women are treated by police depends on a complex web of various factors including marriage, employment, children, housing, prior convictions, race and ethnicity, and presumed ‘femininity’. There are multiple disadvantages which arise as a result of the interaction of gender, class and ‘racial’ inequalities. Indigenous women also share a commonality in treatment by police with Indigenous men which derives directly from their Aboriginal status. Indigenous women and men were the subjects of colonial policies which relied heavily on police intervention—a subject already canvassed in this book. A further complicating factor is the gendered nature of the colonial process. Colonial policy was not gender-neutral. It relied on differing intervention strategies which were dependent on factors such as the sex, the age and the ‘colour’ of the subject. Colonial policies developed extensive classificatory procedures and strategies for controlling subjects depending on whether they were ‘half-caste’, ‘quartercaste’, and so on. These strategies also differentiated between males and females, children and adults.

These multiple layers of interventions and relationships provide the parameters within which Indigenous women and the police interact in contemporary society. They also provide the context for understanding the particular difficulties which Indigenous women face when dealing with police. For example, while domestic violence is an issue which affects all women, it is apparent that Indigenous women suffer more extreme levels of violence than non-Indigenous women. This point is most clearly seen in the rates of homicide for Indigenous women, which are ten times higher than the equivalent rate for non-Indigenous women (Strang 1992). Failure to grasp the specific issues facing Indigenous women has led Aboriginal women to talk about the invisibility which surrounds Indigenous women in discussions of both women in the criminal justice system and Indigenous people in the criminal justice system—in either case the issues facing Indigenous women are blurred or lost (Atkinson 1990a; Payne 1992; Selfe and Thomas 1992). The particularity of the position of Indigenous women cannot be reduced to their status as either women or Indigenous people.

In brief, the specific issues which face Indigenous women when dealing with police include high levels of domestic violence and sexual assault; community pressure not to take action against Aboriginal men; a greater likelihood than for non-Indigenous women of arrest and police custody, particularly for street offences; a police and legal system which is non-Indigenous and predominantly male; and a long history of poor relations with police and distrust of the police.1 The inability to understand the specific issues affecting Indigenous women has meant that many inquiries have failed to adequately grasp the nature of a gendered Indigenous relationship with the police, and with criminal justice agencies more generally. The focus of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody provides one example.

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