An Our Watch resource to guide the prevention of violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and their children is currently being developed. Next step is to incorporate feedback and develop final resource for release February 2018.
Understanding violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women
- Both similar and different to violence against women generally.
- Gendered violence impacts women of all backgrounds, so some similar dynamics – often relationship violence, often part of a pattern of abuse and control. Similar harmful impacts.
- But also differences – need to understand different context of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s lives, as a result of ongoing, intergenerational impacts and legacies of colonisation and racism.
Impacts of colonisation are key
- Understanding what drives violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women means exploring the many legacies and ongoing impacts of colonisation.
- This is why the gender analysis in the national framework (Change the Story) is not enough on its own. We need a specific model for understanding and action.
- We need to prioritise issues associated with colonisation, understand these first, and then put them together with a gendered analysis.
Making progress but …… continued challenges …. so we need to …
- Build the ‘infrastructure’ to support quality prevention programming:
- Policy support, leadership across sectors
- Coordination and QA mechanisms
- Workforce, workforce, workforce
- Scale up and systematise what we know works.
- Undertake innovation projects and action research in areas where we know less, with intensive effort and investment for certain groups.
- Evaluate everything, and start to monitor population level progress against the known drivers of violence.
