Governing sex: removing the right to take responsibility

The Commonwealth Intervention of 2007 in the Northern Territory largely missed its ostensible aim of protecting sexually abused children, argues this essay which examines the relevant social, cultural and historical factors based on specific ethnographic work. Abstract The exposure in 2006 of horrific cases of sexual violence that allegedly characterised Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, evoked responses dominated by a predictable moral panic. Thus the Commonwealth Intervention of 2007 largely missed its ostensible aim of protecting sexually abused children. This essay moves beyond a moralising analysis to consider relevant social, cultural and historical factors based on specific ethnographic work. First I present a sense of some profound historically established differences and common themes in traditional Aboriginal and mainstream law in relation to the regulation of sexuality. Then I draw on evidence that Aboriginal people embraced the notion of ‘two laws’, even as the new era created profound difficulties in relation to sexual norms. Their ‘right to take responsibility’ (Pearson 2000) was further undermined by ‘Interventions’ that unashamedly diminished the ability of NT Aborigines to govern their own communities. Finally, mainstream institutions that are deeply engaged with Aboriginal communities need to consider the ways they may be perpetuating entrenched difficulties

Who's Upsetting Who? Strangeness, Morality, Nostalgia, Pleasure

What is the relationship between negative sentiments towards different kinds of people and the actual difficulties posed by people with different habits and practices living close by one another? Such difficulties are a space of fear and silence because, in this multicultural postmodernworld, we are supposed to celebrate difference in all its manifestations. It is this orthodoxy I want to examine. Let me first note that difficult differences of social practices and preferences are experienced within cultural or racial groups, even within families, as those with teenaged children may be the first to admit. As an anthropologist I begin by taking up a cultural studies practice, turning the analytic eye onto ourselves. Where better to begin than at the dinner party, that quintessential ceremony of white middle-class urban social life, and as good a place as any to glimpse the role played by Aborigines in our tribe’s imagination

Australian Aboriginal Studies: The Anthropologists Accounts

Of all the groups in Australia designated in terms of race or culture none has had their authenticity questioned as much as Aborigines. Popular con-ceptions as well as academic writings make an implicit or explicit division of Aborigines into two kinds. They may be termed traditional and non-traditional, part-Aborigines and full-bloods or those in the north and those in the south (cf. Langton, 1981). One category is commonly seen as more legitimately Aboriginal. The popular view that the 'non-traditional' or 'half-castes' are not 'true' Aborigines is widely recognised, but an-thropologists' complicity in such judgements is less obvious. There could be two reasons for such divisions. They could indicate that Aboriginal groups occupy such different structural positions in the wider society that they are not easily analysed within the same theoretical framework or by using identical research strategies. Alternatively, the Aborigines themselves could be perceived as so different racially or culturally as to preclude any analysis that encompasses both categories. This latter view has probably been the most pervasive both in anthropology and elsewhere, to the extent that the 'southern' or 'non-traditional' groups are sometimes denied inclusion in the category of Aborigines