TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Well, as we've said, Nanette Rogers has been Crown Prosecutor in Alice Springs for more than 12 years. Her paper, and her comments are specifically drawn from her experience of the Aboriginal community in central Australia during those years and should not be considered a general critique of Indigenous Australians. And to repeat our earlier warnings, her accounts of violence against children and babies are extremely graphic and may offend some viewers. I spoke to Dr Rogers in Alice Springs. Annette Rogers, welcome to the program. Why do you think there's been such a long silence about this particular issue in central Australia?
NANETTE ROGERS, ALICE SPRINGS PROSECUTOR: I think there are a number of reasons for that. The first is that violence is entrenched in a lot of aspects of Aboriginal society here. Secondly, Aboriginal people choose not to take responsibility for their own actions. Thirdly, Aboriginal society is very punitive so that if a report is made or a statement is made implicating an offender then that potential witness is subject to harassment, intimidation and sometimes physical assault if the offender gets into trouble because of that report or police statement.
TONY JONES: Now the Federal Minister Mal Brough has told us that Australians may not be ready to hear about children being raped. You obviously think differently?
NANETTE ROGERS: Yes, I do. I feel very strongly that everybody needs to know about it.
TONY JONES: Can we talk in detail about some of the cases. One of them in 2004. They're all shocking, in fact. But one of them in 2004 was the case of a two-year-old child who was raped. Can you explain the circumstances?
NANETTE ROGERS: Yes, the two-year-old was playing outside with some other children. Her mother was away from the house, drunk in a small town. The offender woke up, took the small child, carried it out bush, had the child out bush for some hours. Undressed the child and inserted, simultaneously, two fingers in her vagina and two fingers in her anus and moved his fingers up and down a number of times causing injuries. He then - I'm sorry, he had his trousers off while this was happening. Then he placed the child on his lap and had his penis next to the child's vagina and tried to masturbate and so on. And eventually returned the child back to his father's camp. He was carrying the child with its legs on the side. The child was crying throughout the assault. The child was still crying and bleeding. He handed the child to his drunken father. He himself had been drinking. The father then took the child back to the area that the child had been removed from and when the mother returned from town, where she'd been drinking, the child was crying and the other children indicated that the offender had taken her away some time before and it was then that the bleeding and so on was noticed in her nappy.
TONY JONES: In this case, the offender was drunk, the father of the offender was drunk and the mother of the child who was raped was also drunk.
NANETTE ROGERS: That's so.
TONY JONES: How did that play across the events?
NANETTE JONES: Well, one of the things, of course, is that there's an issue about why was the two-year-old girl left unaccompanied without some kind of supervisory aspect there with the mother being away in town drinking, because it meant then that the offender had an ease of access to that small two-year-old and was able, basically, to do with her what he wanted.
TONY JONES: Let's go to another case. In 2003 there was perhaps even a worse case. It involved a much younger baby - seven-months-old. Can you tell us about that?
NANETTE ROGERS: That was in a remote community. The child or the baby was asleep with other adults in a room in the house. The offender came along and removed the sleeping baby and was in the process of taking it outside the house. One of the adult women woke up and took the baby back and put it back into bed with her and they went back to sleep. Unbeknownst to the sleeping adults, he came back again and removed the child. A man in the house was - saw someone on the verandah at some point, he went out, and he found the offender with this baby and the baby was naked from the waist down. He didn't know anything untoward had happened. He persuaded the man to relinquish the baby because it was cold and all the rest of it. So the offender relinquished the baby after some talking and the man then put it back inside and they went to sleep. In the morning, the mother of the baby - she'd been drinking, she was still drunk - she came back to the house. She changed the clothes of the baby. There was blood on the clothing. The mother then went - left the house.
TONY JONES: She didn't notice? Is the evidence, in fact, that she was too drunk to realise what had happened to her own baby?
NANETTE ROGERS: That's one way of looking at it. The...when the mother left the house, one of the other adult women went and got the child, changed the baby's nappy, noticed the blood and so on and that baby, the seven-month-old baby and the two-year-old both required surgery for external and internal injuries under general anaesthetic.
TONY JONES: There are other cases. One of them is almost too depraved to talk about, but one feels you have to, in a way, get these things out in the open. But this is of an 18-year-old petrol sniffer who actually drowns a young girl while he's raping her?
NANETTE ROGERS: That happened several years ago. A number of children aged about four, five, six and eight, or something like that, were playing in a water hole, maybe a kilometre or more from the community. They were swimming or paddling and he had followed them, going from tree to tree as they walked down to the water hole. While she was playing in the water, he pulled her under and anally penetrated her and drowned her, probably simultaneously. And the matter proceeded to - first of all, there was a committal hearing before a magistrate and the children gave very graphic evidence. Heart-wrenching evidence.
TONY JONES: What was their evidence?
NANETTE ROGERS: Well, their evidence was that they saw him pulling her in the water. They saw bubbles coming up. They tried to throw rocks at him in an effort to get him to desist. And then they ran back to the community to alert, you know, the grandparents.
TONY JONES: It's almost incomprehensible. I mean, they were throwing rocks at him, they were yelling at him - he didn't stop?
NANETTE ROGERS: No, it was awful, absolutely dreadful.
TONY JONES: Is there any way of explaining something like that? I mean apart from the fact he was sniffing petrol?
NANETTE ROGERS: No, I think that cases like this and the sexual assaults of the two-year-old and the seven-month-old baby are really beyond the range of our comprehension. In normal behaviour, we expect people to be, say, murdered or sexually assaulted or, you know, maybe stabbed, but not on a constant basis - not in relation to horrible offences committed on really small children. It's beyond most people's comprehension and range of human experience.
TONY JONES: You might expect these kind of incidents to literally tear apart a community, but it's my understanding from what you've written, that there is a kind of a malaise in these communities that prevents that from happening. These incidents are taken as facts of life rather than things which would, in a way, cause the entire place to look at itself and change?
NANETTE ROGERS: Yes. And I think the reason for that malaise is mostly because of the entrenchment of violence in the whole of the community. But there is also a second aspect and that is that Aboriginal people here are overwhelmed time and time again by a fresh new tragedy. It might be the suicide, it might be the fatal car accident, it might be the premature death of the 20-year-old from renal heart disease, because of diet, failure to thrive, lots of grog, petrol or whatever. All of those tragedies kind of overtake a community. So, yes, it was a dreadful thing that the six-year-old was anally penetrated and killed in the process but then something new takes its place within a very short time.
TONY JONES: How much more do you think, in these communities, are young children exposed to violence than in the community at large and what effect does that have moving on from generation to generation?
NANETTE ROGERS: Well, in my experience, a number of children are assaulted as part of being a child. So, for example, I got a case the other day where the very small baby was stabbed twice in the leg because the husband was trying to stab the wife in the chest and she was holding the baby to the chest so he stabbed the baby twice to the leg. Violence happens to children. Children are punched or hit in the face, punched to various parts of the body. They witness acts of violence, so in a matter that I had last year, the four-year-old witnessed his grandfather being killed - he was stabbed repeatedly to the throat and the four-year-old witnessed it. So, all of those features then mean that the child grows up seeing violence all around him or her and having violence done to him or her and so they become an adult and it's the - then they become violent themselves. But the interesting thing is that I've seen siblings in a family grow up. There might be two brothers and two sisters. The boys grow up to become men. They take wives and then they beat the wives very badly. Their sisters grow up, they get married and they are beaten by their husbands. So it's a real - there's a gender difference between how the violence happens to a large extent, the serious violence.
TONY JONES: It sounds from what you are saying that women and young girls really get the worst of this?
NANETTE ROGERS: Yes, they do.
TONY JONES: In your paper, you cite a particularly awful case of 2001, in an outstation where a man was raping his own very young daughter and at the same time, threatening his wife and his other children with a boning knife.
NANETTE ROGERS: Yes, he was married to a woman - They had three children together - and from a reasonably early age, he started having sexual intercourse with his elder biological daughter. He slept on the mattress with her and his wife and the two smaller children slept on a separate mattress.
TONY JONES: In the same room?
NANETTE ROGERS: In the same room. The wife tried to remonstrate, tried to stop it from happening, tried to protect the daughter, to no avail. This man had a violent history. In fact, he'd been acquitted of a murder in the late 1990s. The offences occurred at outstations, which are often highly dangerous places to be for women and children, because they are unable to escape any of the violence. That's one aspect. But the second aspect is that nobody, no-one talks about the kinds of things that are happening. So in this particular case, how it came to a head was she was taken to the health clinic for a check-up because she was putting on weight and it turned out that she was pregnant to her father.
TONY JONES: Was that ultimately proven in any way?
NANETTE ROGERS: Yes. She had - the young girl had a termination and the DNA from the foetus - the profile meant that the father was, in effect, the father of the child.
TONY JONES: How did other family members in this particular case - I know there was a grandmother involved and presumably other members of the community must have been aware that something was going on?
NANETTE ROGERS: Well, the mother of the girl definitely knew that something was going on but she herself was subject to repeated acts of violence by the husband. So she was, in effect, was unable to do anything. Her mother, that is, the grandmother of the child, was an important woman ceremonially for the area as well as being a well-known painter. She didn't get to really know about it until late in the piece when her own brother mentioned something about it in a low-key way. But she was instrumental when the pregnancy was discovered at the local health clinic about bringing the girl into town and reporting it to the police. And in her statement that she made to police, she said that in olden times, Aboriginal law meant that she wouldn't have been able to talk to anybody about the matter and that he would have - he, the father, would have been punished, but that there were constraints around her talking to anybody about the continued sexual assault, which is really quite mind-boggling.
TONY JONES: So there is a sort of propensity to silence on this these issues built into the culture, as you said?
NANETTE ROGERS: Yes, that's exactly right.
TONY JONES: Which must be very troubling for young women who are educated in modern Australia and have to confront traditional practices in their own communities. Because one of the issues that arises is promised marriages where much older men are promised younger women. A number of cases have arisen out of that. Can you tell us about the one involving the person known as GJ?
NANETTE ROGERS: That was a matter involving a young girl, aged about 14, who had some schooling in Darwin. She was at Yarralin, which is in the Victoria River Downs district and she was promised to a much older man. He came and took her - to take her physically and her grandmother instead - and the young girl didn't want to go. Instead of supporting her, her grandmother basically forced her into the car and assisted the older promised man in removing her physically from the community, where he then had sexual intercourse with her and kept her for a number of days at his outstation. And she's an example of - she was not complicit. She did not want to go. She - you know, it's that kind of new breed of young women hopefully coming through who see the choices that they've got and also, importantly, see the choices that non-Indigenous young women have in the broader society.
TONY JONES: She gave some quite heartbreaking evidence. She said, "I told that old man I'm too young for sex, "but he didn't listen."
NANETTE ROGERS: Yes.
TONY JONES: Are these cases common?
NANETTE ROGERS: They are common in an anecdotal sense. They're not common in terms of us getting prosecution files through the office.
TONY JONES: So, you mean you know that these sorts of things are happening but they don't often come to trial?
NANETTE ROGERS: Yes.
TONY JONES: Are they happening much more commonly than we know of?
NANETTE ROGERS: All child sexual assault in central Australia is happening at much higher rates than are currently being reported to police, as is violence on Aboriginal women and children.
TONY JONES: Let me ask you this - It's an almost impossible question to ask a prosecutor and I appreciate that before I start - but how do you actually deal with this without pulling apart the traditional culture which is sustaining it?
NANETTE ROGERS: Well, I think it's important to recognise that sometimes Aboriginal culture practices do not benefit the victim. They benefit, more often than not, the offender, and if it means criticising those Aboriginal practices that constrain victims or witnesses from giving evidence and ensure the ability of the offender to keep behaving in exactly that same way then why should there be an Aboriginal cultural practice that sustains that?
TONY JONES: When you came to central Australia more than 15 years ago, you began your work, your career as a defender. You've moved on to become a prosecutor. Did that happen because of a particular case, or did it happen because of what you saw over a period of time?
NANETTE ROGERS: It was an accumulated effect. I ended up getting sick of acting for violent Aboriginal men and putting up the same old excuses when I was appearing for them and then when I had time out to do my thesis and standing back and analysing the cases and how various matters proceeded in the Supreme Court I was really taken aback at how much emphasis was placed on Aboriginal customary law in terms of placing the offender in the best light and it really closed off the voices of Aboriginal women, their viewpoints about how customary law impacted on the offence or the offender.
TONY JONES: There have been a number of cases recently in which young women have actually killed their own boyfriends or husbands. Is that something we can talk about?
NANETTE ROGERS: Yes, it's an interesting phenomenon and it's something that has started coming through in the last 12 months in our office in Alice Springs. There are a number of cases where young women, maybe 19, 20, have stabbed their boyfriends with fatal consequences. And it's interesting because it's almost like a new breed of young women coming through. Their mothers and grandmothers would not have done that. They would have just been - not a willing victim, but they wouldn't have taken kind of preventative action, if you like. Whereas these young women are armed with knives and do, if you like, the pre-emptive stabbing. Or because they're so acculturated with violence that's the way that they behave in any event. So it might be the pre-emptive strike because they're in a violent relationship, or it might be that that's the way that you react when you're angry.
TONY JONES: Lynette Rogers, it's sometimes said of both policemen and prosecutors that they only ever see, because of their work, the very worst of the worst. And that changes the way they look at communities. Are you worried at all that may have happened to you?
NANETTE ROGERS: Well, I hope not. When my enthusiasm and eagerness goes out the window then I know it will be time to give up the job.
TONY JONES: It's another tough question for you, but given what's in your paper and what you've told us here tonight, are you worried that the information itself may be abused by tabloids and racists even, shock jocks - the sort of people who will take information like this and exploit it?
NANETTE ROGERS: Yes, because one of the features of the paper is that I say that Aboriginal people in central Australia must take more responsibility for not only talking about the general issues surrounding Aboriginal male violence and the violence of men in remote communities, but also taking responsibility for following through if they're a witness to a matter, following through and giving the correct evidence in court. When I say "correct evidence", the evidence that's contained in their police stories. Because often what we get is that Aboriginal people will provide a statement about a particular offence and then refuse to come to court or when they're in court, refuse to give the evidence because they say, "No, I didn't see it. "No, it's not my responsibility".
TONY JONES: Is that a very common problem that you face?
NANETTE ROGERS: It is quite common and it is extremely frustrating, because sometimes we're unable to continue with prosecutions because there's no evidence as such. So Aboriginal people in central Australia have to take responsibility for the kinds of violence that is happening in and around themselves and their communities and they must follow through with it, stand up and be counted and not just say, "Oh well, the policeman knows the story, "the nurse knows the story, it's not my responsibility". An aspect of that, about why they don't at the present time is because Aboriginal society here tends to be very punitive. So if a witness goes into court and tells the story about what they saw the offender do or whatever it happens to be, they're liable to get physically punished by the offender's family for telling the story and getting the offender into trouble. So it's kind of like - it's a punitive culture, you know, at every turn.
TONY JONES: Nanette Rogers, we've put you through the mill here. We thank you very much for taking the time to come and talk to us tonight, and I'm sure this debate will continue.
NANETTE ROGERS: You're welcome.
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Sydney Morning Herald
