The Australian Sociological Association and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies invites you to attend a public lecture by Dr Kylie Cripps, University of NSW.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse represents a historic moment in the Australian nation’s self-understanding and its willingness to uncover how its institutions have responded to the needs of its most vulnerable citizens. This moment has special relevance for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples where rates of state intervention in child protection cases are far higher than for the rest of the Australian population and where public scrutiny occurs in the tangled context of neo-colonial relations and the legacy of historic injustice.

Dr Cripps will provide evidence of how race, gender, class and age impact on the emotions, reactions and behaviours of key players in responding to child sexual abuse. She will consider how power and privilege influence decisions in ways that have a detrimental impact on Indigenous children, their mothers and broader kin networks. The Royal Commission into Institutional responses to Child Sexual Abuse marks an opportunity for us to reflect on available evidence, theoretical understandings and interpretations of that evidence, and to imagine, as the Commission will be doing, how we may effect institutional change. This paper will contribute to that initiative.

Kylie Cripps is a Pallawah woman and senior lecturer in the Indigenous Law Centre at the University of New South Wales.  She has written extensively on issues relating to Indigenous family violence and child abuse for audiences including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

See the attached document for more details.

RSVP to Daphne Habibis, Deirdre Howard-Wagner, Theresa Petray