A new national body to reduce rates of family and sexual violence toward Aboriginal women and children will launch in Canberra on Wednesday, after years of campaigning by Indigenous women’s safety advocates.
First Nations women are seven times more likely to be killed and 27 times more likely to be hospitalised due to family violence than non-Indigenous women, and reducing rates of violence is a Closing the Gap target.
But advocates say the issue is often under-reported and funding for programs to prevent violence and support victims is ad hoc and siloed.
A new organisation, Our Ways Strong Together, will sit at the centre of a stand-alone First Nations plan and is designed to ensure the strategy does not “sit on the shelf”, but transforms policies across policing, courts, housing, child protection and frontline services, advocates said.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailOur Ways Strong Together’s inaugural director, Aunty Muriel Bamblett, said the body would bring together the lived experiences and expertise of First Nations women, men and gender-diverse people to prevent family, domestic and sexual violence and improve systemic responses to it.
“We have advocated for justice to say: you need to do better with policing. You need to do better with courts, with responses to our women, and to understand all of the policies, the murdered and missing women, the human rights violations. There’s so much in this,” Bamblett said.
The Aboriginal community-controlled organisation aims to work with existing services and to take a more holistic approach, collaborating with housing, health, education and youth peak bodies through the Coalition of Peaks – the organisation responsible for redesigning and steering Closing the Gap policies.
Bamblett said national attention on violence against First Nations women and children, and which cases received that attention, was often at the “whim” of the media.
“We’ve had, tragically, a number of deaths recently … but it’s very often hidden and we’ve got to be grown-up about the fact,” she told Guardian Australia. “It’s the scourge within our communities. We want to address it, but it’s often siloed.”
She said she hopes the peak body will be able to establish a more accurate picture of the scale of the issue through better data collection, and noted a particular silence around sexual violence and assaults.
“We want some level of consistency about family violence, domestic and particularly sexual violence,” she said.
“[Current data] is very patchy and unclear. If we don’t record it, we don’t understand it. So there’s significant pieces of work.”
Recent data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported that 67% of First Nations people aged 15 and over who had experienced physical harm said the perpetrator was a partner or family member.
The Albanese government said the new national organisation was part of a $218.3m funding commitment toward the national plan to reduce violence toward First Nations women and children.
The minister for Indigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, said it would also assist with meeting Closing the Gap targets, which include halving rates of family violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by 2031.
“Our Ways Strong Together represents the community-controlled organisations and services who have been working to support survivors over many years,” she said in a statement.
“Strengthening the community-controlled sector is an important part of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, as all governments work with communities to end family, domestic and sexual violence.”
• In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. First Nations Australians can call can call 13YARN on 13 92 76 for information and crisis support. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org.
