‘Tip of the iceberg’: deaths of four Indigenous women showcase dire state of DV in the NT

Content warning: this article contains detailed descriptions of domestic violence.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers please note that this article mentions deceased persons.

The Northern Territory Coroner’s Court last week concluded a landmark series of inquests into the deaths of four Aboriginal women killed by their intimate partners — Kumanjayi Haywood, Ngeygo Ragurrk, Miss Yunupingu, and Kumarn Rubuntja.

For six weeks, NT Coroner Elisabeth Armitage heard how systems and services repeatedly failed these women, their families, their communities, and the men who murdered them.

Police bungled forms, misread situations, misidentified perpetrators, and leveraged domestic violence call-outs to cross off other criminal matters. Welfare services mixed up names in high-risk referrals, screened out priority cases, and palmed off their work to police. Corrections were unable to provide programs for men in prison and pathways for those on the way out and the hospitality (alcohol and gambling) industry fed cycles of abuse by serving unchecked amounts of liquor to people banned from purchasing it.

Meanwhile, funding cuts and “woeful” commitments from NT and Commonwealth governments were said to have gutted pre-existing programs, thwarted the establishment of new ones, and piled up work on already stretched front-line respondents not trained in domestic violence.

In May 2022, the NT government announced just shy of $20 million over two years would go towards domestic and family violence. Extensive consultations (commissioned by the government) recommended it allocate $180 million over five years as a “bare minimum”, but this was halved and then cut again with its own acknowledgement that “there is likely to be serious concern from stakeholders in relation to the short-term nature of the funding and disappointment that the intensive development and consultation process … has not resulted in a systemic and longer-term commitment to reform.”

The true cost for a genuine NT response is projected to be around $600 million per year.

“[The NT government] say in media and communications which they’ve released that addressing domestic and family and sexual violence requires long-term commitment and generational change. This is the message they want to go out to the media,” Armitage said to domestic and family violence expert Dr Chay Brown during the inquest into the death of Kumarn Rubuntja.

“Is the funding that’s been allocated demonstrating any long-term commitment? Is it anywhere near sufficient for generational trade change? Is it anywhere near sufficient to prevent domestic family and sexual violence?”

“No,” Brown responded, calling it “a joke”.

The court heard the NT is the national leader (by a factor of seven) in rates of domestic and family violence, but receives only 1.8% of federal government funding.

According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data presented to the coroner, intimate partner homicide in the NT is seven times the national average and domestic violence-related assaults three times higher, up 42% from 2019 to 2021. Indigenous women accounted for 88% of all domestic and family violence-related assault victim survivors in the NT and 100% of homicide victims.

Domestic and family violence-linked assaults in Tennant Creek were three times the NT rate, while Katherine and Alice Springs registered 2.4 times higher than the territory average.

Brown said these figures were “the very, very tip of the iceberg” due to reporting barriers: “fear of reprisal violence, fear of escalating it when the police go… fear of what’s going to happen to their partners.”

Brown also told the court that while the NT has all the standard “drivers of violence”, it also contends with intergenerational trauma, systemic racism, discrimination, geographic disadvantage, housing insecurity, unemployment, isolation, alcohol and substance abuse, and the list goes on.

“I want you to think about the Northern Territory and consider how many of those risk factors disproportionately exist here. Coupled with the lack of services — no services in many instances — coupled with the extremely high cost of living and the cost of service delivery, coupled with the fact that most of the things we’re told are national supports do not exist and do not operate here,” Brown told the court, pointing to helplines that are redundant given much of the NT has no network coverage.

“All of those things that disproportionately exist in the territory, it’s little wonder that we have these high rates of violence.”

The Coroner’s Court will resume in October-November for the institutional response on how to address the gaping holes in funding, resourcing, training, and relevant programs. Included in this is a new co-respondent model between police and domestic violence experts, the resurrection of men’s behavioural change programs in and out of prisons, information sharing systems between respondents, a massive investment in training, and a fundamental shift in the way that systems and services engage with Indigenous people.

While chronicling a system riddled with failings, notably, the Coroner’s Court attempted to set the tone for this new way of engaging with Indigenous peoples through its approach to the families and communities of victims and perpetrators. There were many months of consultations with family and significant delays to hearings to ensure the family had time to process things, to tune into proceedings, to have conversations within their communities, and to settle conflicts between communities over the deaths of these women.

As these tensions boiled away in each of the inquests — and in many instances continues to do so — the Coroner endeavoured to facilitate a process of “healing”.

If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.

If you or someone you know is affected by alcohol or gambling addiction, call Gambler’s Help on 1800 858 858.