Real action needed on Aboriginal deaths in custody Of the 516 recorded Indigenous people who died in custody since 1991, 335 were in prison, 177 were in police custody and four were in youth detention.
The latest Australian Institute of criminology figures show there were 489 Indigenous deaths in custody since the end of the 1991 royal commission to June 30, this year. Stanley Russell: why did NSW police shoot an Aboriginal man dead in a Sydney house?
Two Aboriginal people have died in custody in Western Australia over the Christmas period. An Aboriginal woman who died in hospital in Perth on Christmas Eve suffered a “medical episode” in prison 13 days earlier. It came just days before the death of a 68-year-old man in police custody in Queensland.
While it is important to improve the conditions for Indigenous people when they deal with police and when they are in prison, the main cause of the high death rate is that Indigenous people are much more likely than the general population to be imprisoned and to come into contact with police.
The highest number of Indigenous deaths in prison custody in 2021/22 occurred in NSW, with five deaths. There were four Indigenous deaths in prison in Queensland, three in Western Australia, two in South Australia and one each in Victoria and the Northern Territory.
The leading cause of death for Indigenous males was circulatory diseases (closely followed by cancer and other neoplasms), while for Indigenous females it was cancer and other neoplasms (Table D1. 23.1, Figure 1.23. 2).
It's estimated that as many as 1 in 3 Indigenous children were taken between 1910 and the 1970s, affecting most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia.
In 2019/20, 952 Aboriginal children across NSW were removed from their families, a 2.6% increase on the year prior. In total, there were 6,688 Aboriginal children in what is known as “out-of-home-care” – about 41% of the total number of kids in the system.
between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities in the period from approximately 1910 until 1970. '
Being a witness or victim of family violence early in life increases the risk of future justice system involvement as an offender. An estimated 87 per cent of all Aboriginal women in custody have been a victim of sexual, physical or emotional abuse, with most having suffered abuse in multiple forms[xiv].
There were 13,716 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners, up from: 13,197 in the December quarter 2022.
The death rate for indigenous people was 5.65 per 100,000 of the general Aboriginal population. The rate for non-Aboriginal people was 0.3. The ratio of these rates indicates that Aboriginal people were 16.5 times more likely to die in custody.
In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s.
Between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died, compared with only 399 to 440 colonisers. The tallies of the dead are not the only measure of what took place, according to Dr Bill Pascoe, a digital humanities specialist and key researcher on the project.
The research project, currently in its eighth year and led by University of Newcastle historian Emeritus Professor Lyndall Ryan, now estimates more than 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives were lost in more than 400 massacres, up from a previous estimate of 8,400 in 302 massacres.
Why were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children taken from their families? The forcible removal of First Nations children from their families was based on assimilation policies, which claimed that the lives of First Nations people would be improved if they became part of white society.
1969. By 1969, all states had repealed the legislation allowing for the removal of Aboriginal children under the policy of 'protection'.
The Stolen Generations refers to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were removed from their families between 1910 and 1970. This was done by Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, through a policy of assimilation.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
Over half (56%, or 461 of 818) of all young people in detention on an average night in the June quarter 2022 were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people.
Another review prepared for the Australian federal police in 2021 found that at least 25.6% of children under 12 and 18% of those aged between 13 and 17 who go missing while in care are Indigenous, despite First Nations children making up just 5.9% of the total population under 18.
On 26 January 1838 Nunn and his men massacred up to 50 Aboriginal people camped at Waterloo Creek.
Without previous exposure to the smallpox virus, First Nations peoples had no resistance, and up to 70 per cent were killed by the disease.
Key points. In 2018, the Indigenous child mortality rate was 141 per 100,000—twice the rate for non-Indigenous children (67 per 100,000). Since the 2008 target baseline, the Indigenous child mortality rate has improved slightly, by around 7 per cent.
The NSW Minister for Education, John Perry, instructed NSW schools to remove Aboriginal children from school if non-Aboriginal parents complained. Non-Aboriginal parents frequently claimed diseases were rampant among Aboriginal students, and that they were unhygienic.