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“They Were Treating Me Like a Dog”: The Colonial Continuum of State Harms Against Indigenous Children in Detention in the Northern Territory, Australia
Abstract
The analytic lens of state crime can inform our understanding of the mistreatment of Indigenous children and young people in settler-colonial state institutions. Based on a critical analysis of the proceedings and findings of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory (2016–2017), this article identifies state crimes of torture and abuse inflicted on Indigenous children in carceral and non-carceral institutions. These crimes breach international human rights laws but are more than a set of individual harms. They are also part of a pattern of ongoing structural violence that reasserts the settler-colonial state's sovereign position. This article identifies that the Royal Commission itself is complicit in reproducing state sovereignty. It argues that redressing state crimes against Indigenous children requires challenging the structural injustice of the settler-colonial state.
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Notes
I use this term because of its lineage but regard it as problematic due to, first, the legal connotations of the word “settlement” that presupposes that the non-Indigenous people were first arrivals, thus in international law legitimatizing the processes of settlement as lawful; second, it implies a peacefulness in the process; and third, it presumes a homogeneity across settler standing apart from the homogenous process in relation to non-settler colonies. I prefer the term “occupier colonies” because it speaks to the violence and illegitimate process, or simply “colonies”.
It has its legacy in the Aboriginal Protection Acts, segregation of Indigenous people on missions and reserves and in forms of pastoral exploitation in which Indigenous people's wages were withheld ( Balint, Evans and McMillan 2014: 207).
In Australia, for instance, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty and territory were never ceded, treaties were never entered into and Indigenous laws and sovereignty were never renounced.
See Voller ( 2016a: 6).
Before the passage of this legislation, the use of the restraint chair was enabled through the “wide discretion” afforded to the Commissioner to determine what restraints could be imposed ( Goldflam 2016: 841; Middlebrook 2017: 3025).