I mean, apart from the disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates, or the generations of children being taken away from their parents just for being aboriginal.It's not like they have any reason why they wouldn't trust the authorities or anything. I can't possibly think why aboriginal children might not talk to the authorities. This has been his schtick for a dog's age, using children to push this one-half paternalist one-half white supremacy crap. The entire article is one long holiday into miseries created (and tut-tutted) by the very same colonials who then pretend poverty and its associated evils are ingrained in a culture (he calls it "chaos") better off dead and that anyone who disagrees is enabling child abuse and alcoholism and willful unemployment. A few paragraphs in Toohey is castigating a battered woman for her culture's lack of "shame" about violence. "Different understandings of right and wrong" is making a lot of dogs bark. And it sounds like he himself may have middling English, poor Warlpiri, and even worse Latin. What Toohey is describing - abuse performed by someone the abused knows, the abused is ashamed of the abuse and hesitates to report it, et al - is universal. It's a ridiculous expectation if you know anything about how victims are groomed and the ways in which society is primed to encourage that grooming but call it benign while providing plausible cover for abusers. There is no culture that actively encourages those kinds of disclosures in that kind of environment the way we would all like. I blame auto-correct.Īustralian Indigenous children not "volunteering" to tell adults about having been or currently being abused or neglected does not make them aberrant or their families backwards it means they've been socialized like everybody else. This is a conversation they've been having for decades, and putting this piece out in Reconciliation Week is not, I suspect, an accident. The Herald-Sun editorial position is that the Stolen Generations didn't happen, and that if it did, then it was for their own good.Īnd the author, Paul Toohey, also has form ( ) in presenting Australian Indigenous people in the worst possible light, including in terms of how they're apparently always raping children. It's the employer of Andrew Bolt, who was convicted of racial vilification (and hasn't, from any of his media commentary positions, stopped complaining about how he's being shut up). It's not the Sun-Herald, it's the Herald-Sun. Scholarship and accuracy are certainly not the hallmarks of News. Paul Toohey doesn't write for Sydney's Sun-Herald (liberal, centre, Fairfax Press) but Murdoch's News Corporation stable (Australian, Daily Telegraph, Sun-herald, etc.) The article itself can be found here: It stands out, and would've been better left out totally. The whole sentence/paragraph is rather unnecessary and irrelevant in the article as a whole. Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and culture, Language and politics, Snowclones. It is, to say the very least, curious timing from the Sun-Herald newspaper.īack in 2013, we reported another " No word for rape" story, that one about the alleged lack of the word and the associated concept in Urdu. This week marks the start of Reconciliation Week - intended for all Australians to learn more about our First Nations cultures. Even if it did lack word X (it doesn’t) that doesn’t mean they all do Warlpiri is but one of over 100 Aboriginal languages spoken in the Northern Territory.children, particularly sexual abuse survivors, might be averse to saying rape anyway: it’s a legal/clinical term.the English word rape has Latin rapere as its origins, meaning “to seize or take” (even if Romans might have said stuprare).this English-Warlpiri dictionary I found after a quick google lists a separate sense of kanyi as “to seduce or rape”.lack of word X in language Y ≠ language Y lacks concept X.However, I find one implication of this particular snowclone (that, for Warlpiri speakers, raping is as commonplace as taking) to be abhorrent, and I wonder if a discourse other than Australia’s could generate it. Certainly, child sexual abuse and substance abuse problems exist in Australian Indigenous communities (just as they do in other Australian communities).
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