Injury, Int. J. Care Injured (2008) 3955, 525-535 INJURY, ELSEVIER www.eisevier.com/locate/injury Indigenous family violence: A statistical challenge Kyllie Cripps* indigenous Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Onemda VicHealth Koori Health Unit, Centre for Health Et. Society, The University of Melbourne, Australia KEYWORDS Indigenous; Aboriginal; Family violence; Child abuse; Indigenous data collection Summary The issue of family violence and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities across Australia has attracted much attention throughout 2007, including significant intervention by the federal government into communities deemed to be in crisis. This paper critically examines the reporting and recording of Indigenous violence in Australia and reflects on what 'statistics' can offer as we grapple with how to respond appropriately to a problem defined as a 'national emergency'. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction The issue of family violence and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities across Australia, more specifically the Northern Territory, has been the subject of intense media coverage throughout 2007. This scrutiny began in 2006 when an explicit and confronting interview aired on ABC's Lateline on the 15th May in which Chief Prosecutor Nanette Rogers detailed a number of graphic cases involving the sexual abuse of young children. She made it clear that "these cases are beyond the range of our comprehension" and "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". 1 In response to the often intense public outcry that followed this interview the Northern Territory government announced an inquiry into child sex abuse in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. 2 The final report entitled Ampe Akelyernemane — "Little Children are Sacred" — Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse was prepared by Rex Wild QC and Pat Anderson and was released to • E-mail: kcripps@unimelb.edu.au (K. Cripps). the public on June 15 2007. They, like Rogers, found clear evidence that child sexual abuse is a significant problem across the Territory. 3 Their findings were also consistent with several other reports including the New South Wales Aboriginal Child Sexual Assault Taskforce report Breaking the Silence: Creating the Future (2006) in which it was reported that Aboriginal child sexual assault was a 'huge' issue in every one of the 29 communities visited. The Taskforce reported that people described child sexual abuse as 'massive', 'epidemic', and 'it's a way of life'. When asked if they could think of a family in their community who had not been affected by child sexual assault, no Aboriginal person could name any such family. 4 These findings are not new; the increasing incidence of violence in Indigenous communities has been the subject of numerous reports for more than a decade. 5-9 Report findings like these are largely based on extensive community consultations, written submissions, reviews of existing literature, and an analysis of available statistics. This methodologi- cal approach involves the triangulation of a wide variety of data sources to sufficiently demonstrate that the occurrence of violence in Indigenous communities and among Indigenous people "is disproportionately high in comparison to the rates 0020-1383/$ — see front matter 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.