Our Greatest Challenge: Aboriginal Children and Human Rights by Hannah McGlade, 284 pp, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2012, ISBN 9781922059109 (pbk), $39.95.

I did not want to write this review. I did not want to read this book. I could not make myself read the details of the sexual abuse suffered by small children contained within its pages; it was too horrifying, too upsetting. Child sexual abuse is a difficult topic to talk about; it is a difficult topic to write about; it is a difficult topic to read about. And it is even more difficult, it seems, when the abuse is happening in Aboriginal communities.

Why is child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities so difficult to talk about? We should be shouting about it; we should be screaming and yelling and demanding that it stop. But we are not.

As Hannah McGlade explains in her confronting book Our Greatest Challenge: Aboriginal Children and Human Rights, child sexual abuse is very difficult for the victims and their families to talk about – for all sorts of reasons, including: intimidation, shame, powerlessness, and normalisation. Tragically, many Aboriginal girls ‘simply accepted that they would be sexually abused’ (p. 98). Others do not expect to be believed. Those who do tell, and whose cases get taken through the criminal justice system, have such a low expectation of success that it serves as a disincentive to others to speak out.

Non-Indigenous people do not talk about it for other reasons. There was a flurry of media interest and outraged/ill-informed commentary following the release of the ‘Little Children are Sacred Report’ in 2007, but the failure of the Northern Territory Emergency Response to adequately address the problem of child sexual abuse has gone largely unremarked. Disinclination to interfere in something that is incorrectly viewed as ‘cultural’, or an ‘Aboriginal problem’, may help to explain the deafening silence from the non-Indigenous community on this issue, but that is only part of the reason. The real reason we do not talk about it is because we do not want to know about it, because knowing about it and not doing anything to stop it makes us monsters.

Settler Australians have a long history of not listening to stories about Aboriginal oppression and abuse; white and black activists have always struggled to make non-Indigenous people hear about the atrocities suffered by Aboriginal people. Child sexual abuse is the latest horrifying example in a long list of horrifying examples. By not acting to protect Aboriginal children from sexual abuse – regardless of the race of the perpetrator – we are actively discriminating against them, and denying them their human rights.

As McGlade’s study makes clear, the current epidemic of child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities is directly attributable to the trauma of colonisation, violent dispossession, family disruption, and ongoing racial discrimination. And we have known about it for more than ten years. McGlade analyses a decade of government reports and inquiries – one could also look at Christine Choo’s 1990 report Aboriginal Child Poverty sponsored by the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care.

A Noongar woman, victim-survivor of child sexual abuse, human rights lawyer, and doctor of philosophy, McGlade brings a wealth of personal, professional, and academic expertise and insight to this most difficult of subjects. Seeking solutions from outside Australia, she draws inspiration and ideas from the United States and Canada, arguing that any future Australian responses must be based on the empowerment of women and children; must be developed from the ‘grassroots’ by communities; and must be in close cooperation with the criminal justice system. It must also have the support of the entire Australian nation.

Rani Kerin

The Australian National University