Girl gang-rape warnings ignored

By Padraic Murphy and Tony Koch

December 13, 2007 07:00am

THE family of a 10-year-old gang-rape victim have revealed they had warned child safety authorities she would be attacked if taken out of a Cairns foster home and returned to their remote Aboriginal community of Aurukun.

Amid a continuing public outcry over the Queensland Department of Child Safety's failure to protect the girl and a Queensland District Court judge's controversial decision not to jail her attackers, her family has told of a community in crisis and "a little girl who has had the light turned off on her life".

They expressed outrage at the sentence the nine males received, and claim some of the offenders had first raped the girl when she was seven.

"She should never have been allowed to come back from foster care while those boys were still here. We told that to welfare. (Some of) those boys had raped her in the past," the girl's mother said.

In October, judge Sarah Bradley decided not to record convictions against six teenage attackers and gave three others, aged 17, 18 and 26, suspended sentences over the rape.

The sentences will be appealed and dozens of other sex abuse cases from the cape reviewed after the lenient sentences in the gang-rape case were revealed.

The prosecutor in the case, Steve Carter - who described the rape as "a form of childish experimentation" of which the victim was a willing participant - has also been stood down pending an internal investigation.

The girl's aunt said she was deeply offended by Mr Carter's claim that the victim had consented to the rape, and said suggestions underage sex was a fact of life in cape communities was abhorrent.

"That's not right. It's not traditional to have sex without parents' consent. Something is not right. She is a little girl who has had the light turned off on her life," she said.

Her uncle, the family patriarch, said sexual assaults, family violence and drugs had become so bad in the community he would support a Northern Territory-style intervention.

"The violence happens all the time. Something needs to be done, we shouldn't have to live like this," he said.

Cape York Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson last night described the case as "just the tip of the iceberg" of dysfunction in indigenous communities.

Mr Pearson blasted the notion that indigenous children taken into care and placed with non-indigenous foster carers were "another Stolen Generation" - as social workers in the Aurukun case believed.

He said that where children's welfare was under threat, the placement should be "one of safety, whether it is whitefellas or blackfellas".

"Those child protection practices that have sought to place Aboriginal children exclusively with Aboriginal carers have resulted in a great deal of harm for the individual children under care," Mr Pearson said.

"This is a case of children in urgent need of protection. As long as Aboriginal society is so dysfunctional that we have to take children into care and protection, we should never hear people bleat about some Stolen Generation.

"Today children on communities are living in dysfunctional situations where their welfare is under threat. There should be no hesitation in taking them out of those threatening circumstances and placing them with carers - whitefellas or blackfellas."

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has vowed to take radical action and work with federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin if the review of sex abuse cases finds systemic problems.

"What's not clear until we look at all of these cases is, is it a systemic issue where the standard of justice is somehow different or lower in these communities?" Ms Bligh said.

"Or is this a one-off aberration from one particular officer?"

The girl's family speak to her once a week by satellite link because she is housed in a secret location in north Queensland.

"She sleeps with the light on. She gets jumpy when they get new case workers," her uncle said.
The uncle said no authority had contacted the family since the story was reported. He first heard about it on the radio, and he welcomed the opportunity to speak to the media.

Authorities had neglected to inform the family the case was being heard in October in a courthouse less than 100m from the victim's former home.