As part of the ANU Anthropology seminar series, Dr Sarah Holocombe will be presenting her work on gender violence and human rights in Aboriginal central Australia.

Abstract

Violence as part of a normative system of inter-family relations in some remote regions of Australia is now widely recognised as a significant social issue. Alice Springs in particular, according to ABS data, has the highest rates of family and domestic violence in Australia, approximately half of which is due to visitors from regional communities. The formal legal system representing Aboriginal people, established from 1973 in Alice Springs, has instrumentalised women as the ‘victims’ and men as the ‘perpetrators’. And while these two legal positions are oppositional this is often not the case for the couple, who rarely separate. Aboriginal women are known as ‘non-compliant’ and often discouraged from attending court by the prosecutors of domestic violence cases. An examination of why Aboriginal women tend to be ‘bad victims’ allows us to explore the subjectivity in these familial encounters.

Yet, this subjectivity is also shifting with the relatively recent introduction of therapy culture, through organisations such as the Women’s Shelter Outreach Service and the Cross Borders Indigenous Family Violence Program. These interventions are actively attempting to re-fashion the self of these ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ respectively. For my purposes, the role this therapeutic technology plays in the production of individuals ‘free to choose’ offers an insight into the incremental transformation of subjects into human rights holders. Although this human rights discourse may be nascent as a politically reformative program in this region, it is implicit in the formation of the modern citizen-subject in myriad ways.