Not Just a Number: Legal expert says Closing the Gap DV target is not on track

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Thelma Schwartz, from Queensland Indigenous Family Violence and Legal Services, says the Closing the Gap target on reducing rates of violence against Indigenous women is unlikely to be met on current tracking.

Transcript

00:00 It's good to see a renewed interest, but what strikes me is how we actually embed actions.

00:07 I think when I look at the rates of violence against our women, our women experience domestic

00:13 and family violence at the rates of 35 times that of other non-Indigenous women. Our women

00:19 are also killed at 11 times the rate of non-Indigenous women. So what are we actually doing in terms

00:25 of tangible actions to change these outcomes? I look at the fact that we have a national

00:31 partnership agreement on closing the gap, Target 13, which speaks to the reduction of

00:35 the rates of violence against our women and children. And we're meant to reduce those

00:40 rates to zero by 2031, 50% as we progress towards zero. What are we actually doing to

00:47 see on the ground results? Because I'm not seeing those on the ground results. What we

00:51 see a lot of in my practice across the state is my women are misidentified. We don't present

00:58 as the ideal victim, especially when police are called out and there are acts of retaliatory

01:03 violence. And this is about understanding the relationship as a whole. And when police

01:07 are called out to incidents, it might be that particular moment she's actually exploded

01:13 and she's assaulted him. She's very upset, she's very angry. He's very calm and controlled.

01:19 So when police come into that situation, who are they going to better engage with? They're

01:23 going to engage with the person who's presenting as calm and controlled, as opposed to the

01:27 other person who's very agitated and alarmed. And in that instance, we're seeing that the

01:33 real victim is being misidentified, because no one's actually looking at the history of

01:38 what's going on between these two parties. The other thing that we see a lot of in our

01:43 communities is a real lack of trust in policing. We haven't actually got to the heart of looking

01:48 at the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and police.

01:52 And we know that there is a lack of trust. One only has to go back 31 years for the Royal

01:57 Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody to have a look at that history and unpack

02:01 it. What are we doing to build better trusting relationships with police and Aboriginal and

02:06 Torres Strait Islander peoples?

02:07 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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