Why Aboriginal women fear NSW’s new coercive control laws could do more harm than good
It is a well-known tragedy that Aboriginal women are overrepresented as victims of domestic, family and sexual violence. In 17 years leading the Wirringa Baiya Aboriginal Women’s Legal Centre, I’ve been told about horrific physical assaults, sexual assaults and psychological abuse by partners and or family members. All of our clients just want the abuse to stop.
But the decision to report abuse to police comes with many barriers and fears for Aboriginal women. These include being dismissed by police, having their children taken, being misidentified as the abuser instead of the victim, and their ex-partner being killed in custody.
The NSW government recently released a bill that will criminalise abuse that is commonly referred to as “coercive control”. Coercive control is the execution and maintenance of power over the other person in a relationship, and behaviours range from physical and sexual violence to psychological abuse, economic abuse and denigration of a person’s cultural, racial and spiritual identity.
Sadly, the criminal legal system does not serve Aboriginal women well, despite some improvements in policing over the years. Aboriginal women in NSW continue to be grossly overrepresented in custody: as recently as June 2022, Aboriginal women comprised 40% of the total female inmate population. We assist Aboriginal women in custody with a variety of civil and family law issues, and we confidently say all of those clients have lived experience of domestic, family and sexual violence. These statistics make it extremely difficult for Aboriginal women to believe that the NSW criminal legal system is just and fair for all, or even has improved for Aboriginal people.
This is why our centre has told the government from the outset that a coercive control offence should not come before thorough cultural and systems reform, including: police culture, police investigations, criminal court systems and support systems. We do not want to see a new offence that once implemented will harm, not protect, Aboriginal women.
If an Aboriginal woman is unable to persuade a police officer that she is the primary victim of physical violence, what hope or incentive is there to try to persuade a police officer that she has experienced ongoing psychological abuse and economic abuse?
Police may not only apply their conscious and unconscious bias against a distressed woman versus an articulate “in control” male partner, but also bring with them their overt and unconscious racism about Aboriginal people being bludgers/bad with money and poor parents, especially if the other party is not Aboriginal.
These racist stereotypes exist, are persistent and are held by many parts of the non-Aboriginal community at large, so it is no surprise that that they are held by police officers with the role of deciding who is a victim and who is not. We want reform that will eliminate structural racism and sexism, and be trauma-informed.
In its attempt to minimise misidentification, the government has also drafted a complex offence that will be very difficult to prove. We fear this will mean there will be few charges laid and few successful prosecutions. The only other jurisdiction in Australia with a separate offence, Tasmania, saw fewer than 200 convictions in the first 14 years. We are disappointed that the proposed offence will only apply to intimate partner relationships, not family relationships where coercive control also occurs in Aboriginal communities.
We want to see the immediate establishment of an independent, multi-agency taskforce to oversee the consultation on draft legislation, implementation, and ongoing review of the legislation. This taskforce should also have oversight of the cultural and systems reform required.
While we acknowledge the intent of the attorney-general is honourable, the coercive control offence is being rushed and will not achieve its aims. The government must prioritise the reform of our criminal legal system to make it just for all. And only then should it legislate an offence that will protect all correctly identified victim survivors from the harmful and corrosive effects of coercive control.
Christine Robinson is a Bundjalung woman and coordinator of Wirringa Baiya Aboriginal Women’s Legal Centre.