-- ----- 991010510 '. 111 e-i B $tvt $Fe-iCt$ The National Ubrary supplies copies of this article under licence from the Copyright Agency limited (CAL). Further reproductIons of this farti6le can onlYbemadeuniierITcence. - _.,-- I' ... . Rob White * Much concern was expressedaboutthe 'moraldanger' of Aboriginalgirls How young indigenous people use public spaces, and how these spaces are regulated, are important social issues. There are two causes of the greater surveillance and intervention in pUblic places, first, of young people high levels of contact with the criminal justice system second, disproportionately high numbers of young people in police custody and detention. Why and how this is the case war- rants close attention. Public Space and 'Offensive' Behaviour Indigenous people are subject to police interven- tion at a much higher rate than non-indigenous peo- ple. In many cases, this involves the. use of 'street offence' types of legislation to a degree much high- er than that associated with non-indil:enous people. For example, a recent New South Wales study. (Jochelson, 1997) found that local goverrunent areas with high percentages of indigenous people tended to have higher rates of court appearances for public order offences such as 'offensive behaviour' and 'offensive language'. There was an over-repre- sentation of Aboriginal people amongst the alleged offenders for offensive behaviour or offensive lan- guage in both those local government areas with high indigenous populations and those with low proportions of Aborigines in their pop- ulation. Similarly, another study (Mackay & Munro 1996: 6) found that: 'Aborigines were 10.3 times more like- ly to be processed for 'resist police', 11.8 times for 'hinder police', 14.8 times for 'indecent language' and 5.5 times for 'offensive behaviour'in Victoria in 1993/94. The use of local government ordinances in relation to public drinking, particularly as this affects indigenous people, has also been questioned in the Victorian context (see Alias & lames 1997). Historically, state intervention in the lives of young people, who are visible in pUblic places such as the street, has ostensibly also been premised on a 'social welfare' concern. Goodall (1990) docu- ments how young indigenous women, for example, were subject to systematic removal from their fam- ilies, and that they bore the heaviest impact of such policies between 1900 and 1940. Much concern was expressed about the 'moral danger' of Aborig- inal girls, a phenomenon which has its counterpart in contemporary expressions of unease about young women's public presence as being somehow 'harmful to the local community' (Carrington, 1990). The visibility of young women on public streets also makes them targets for police law and order campaigns (Payne, 1990). I The regulation of indigenous people's use of pub- lic space takes several different forms and is partly related to local political and law enforcement cir- cumstances. For instance, Cunneen and Robb (1987) examined the nature of 'law and order cam- paigns' in north-west New South Wales in the mid- 1980s. They found that such campaigns were large- ly orchestrated by local power elites in the country towns, and that the key tar- gets of the campaigns were Aboriginal people. The calls for more police and increased police pow- ers were equated with clearing the streets of indigenous people, who were presented as, in essence, the 'criminal problem'. Similar types of research, particularly into the media treatment of indigenous young people, has likewise found that invariably they are re-pre- sented almost exclusively in criminal terms (see Sercombe 1995; Hi! & Fisher 1994). Media and political campaigns which equate crime with the 'Aboriginal problem' have also been implicated in the apparent rise in vigilantism, directed primarily against indigenous youth, in places such as Townsville (see Hil, 1998). Such sentiments and political orientations are * Rob White is an Associate Professor in Sociology/Law at the University of Tas- mania (on secondmentfrom Criminology at the University of Melbourne) He is the editor of Australian Youth Subcultures: On the Margins and in the Mainstream, and co-author of Rethinking Youth. Social Alternatives Vol. 18 No. 2, April 1999 39