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The SafeCare Story

This book tracks the evolution of SafeCare Inc., which, between 1989 and 2009, offered a community-based treatment of all members of families where child sexual abuse had occurred or was a risk, through the eyes of its Clinical Psychologist, Christabel Chamarette.

Part history, part program manual, it is a fascinating, educative and insightful exploration of child sexual abuse and the reasons people offend. It describes SafeCare’s innovative and successful approach to treating offenders while providing support for their families.

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SafeCare Incorporated
PO Box 1290, Fremantle
Western Australia 6959
admin@safecare.org.au

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PRESENTATION - DARRELL HENRY

Sexual Abuse and Violence in Aboriginal Communities -
History and Potential for Healing and Change.

In the early days of the surfacing of a collective voice for Aboriginal Peoples, particularly led by women, in the late 70s and continuing through into the 1980s, there was a real push for a compassionate healing process for all Aboriginal people. This was particularly a push for a healing and supported change process for men. Men then began also to champion healing from family violence and sexual abuse. It has got somewhat lost in a maze of issues, but we need to come back to that as the punitive models have become dominant. That is particularly the case for sexual offenders. Prison treatment models for sex offenders are not effective in major part because they are devoid of family, culture and community context and input. There is no Aboriginal lead sexual abuse treatment for men in Australian community settings.
In a working lifetime as a Psychologist with these issues in diverse Aboriginal communities in WA, I know the treatment of our own people who have sexually offended is still the remotest and darkest corner of contemporary thought and planning for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. We can look at a case example where some successful healing/therapeutic change process in community has worked.
This isn’t an academic research or statistical presentation. In fact. it is the power of one. I have worked with many men, women and children in the nexus of family violence and sexual abuse. In presenting a sketch of a potential community based Aboriginal run service I maintain that it is also important to look at sexual abuse in the diverse Aboriginal communities as part of an ongoing wave of the violation from the initial colonisers. This is a huge sexual shadow and abusive sexual practices were unleashed on very disempowered Aboriginal peoples. Many of the colonisers saw Aboriginal women as their sexual slaves; whether it was on cattle stations or in towns. In many places they were used as comfort women. Children were prey to sex offenders right from the start of colonisation because they were often separated from their families as child labourers. There was often no protection for them. Then people of the Stolen Generation were pushed together in missions and others to reserves that had no real safety for men women and children. They already had this huge cycle of destructive sexual abuse happening within our own community and from without by white people.
The hardest truth for us to face is that there were Aboriginal sex offenders active in our own broken communities at least from the start of child removals. I have first-hand experience of working with some of these people. The enormity of challenges to therapeutic and healing change for our young men and men is something we really have to face. There is a sub-strata of sexual malaise and disempowerment, mixed with deep cultural distortions and dislocation in many communities that no program has addressed. We now know that there was a lot of trans-generational-trauma but we are less aware that that includes disturbances to child and adult sexuality. The wave goes on mixed with pornography and the dark sexual shadows of contemporary Eurasian societies.