Establishing the United Nations' Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the Minimum Standard for All Forensic Practice with Australian Indigenous Peoples

Abstract

In this article, Indigenous forensic practice is considered from a culturally informed perspective. Concerns are raised about forensic psychologists' continuing failure to operationalise all dimensions of modern Indigenous diversity in their day‐to‐day practice and research. Psychologists are also asked to contemplate the degree to which systemic factors from within their own discipline might be contributing to the ever‐increasing over‐representation of Indigenous peoples in the Australian correctional system. A radical restructure of practice is recommended in which the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is adopted as the minimum standard for restructuring what is suggested to remain a deeply assimilationist model of practice based on dominant culture and migrant management strategies, neither of which is relevant to forensic practice with Indigenous peoples.

Key words:

• culturally informed practice
• unintended hurting while helping model
• Indigenous human rights
• Indigenous
• institutional racism
• multiple dimensions of indigenous diversity

Notes

1. United Nations General Assembly (2007). Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNRIP: first adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. Thursday 13 September 2007. Adopted in Australia 2009.

2. It is not universally accepted that the over‐representation of Indigenous peoples in the correctional system reflects the presence of Institutional racism. See the debate between Weatherburn, Fitzgerald, & Hua (2003) and Cunneen (2006), summarised in Blagg (2008, pp. 9–11).

3. Australian Human Rights Commission. UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Fact Sheets: 1:http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/declaration/fact_sheet1.html Retrieved 27 August 2012. 2:http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/declaration/fact_sheet2.html Retrieved 27 August 2012.

4. See RAP@ http://www.Psychology.org.au/reconciliation Retrieved 27 August 2012.

5. Electronic edition, forensic articles from The Australian Psychologist, the Australian Journal of Psychology, and Clinical Psychologist.2001–2011.Forensic College APS.

6. Databases: Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES.

7. Each Indigenous group in Australia refers to their unique and discrete cultural region as “their country” in the same way as Europeans refer to their discrete cultural regions as countries.

8. Personal communication (2010). Indigenous Adviser, Indigenous Development Unit, Department of Education NSW.

9. For example, the goal of eugenics was to control birthing rates, offspring “type,” and environments. While strategies were applied in an ad hoc fashion determined by the administrator's academic affiliations rather than via broad strategic planning, and the approaches adopted at one mission might be at odds with the methods used at other locations and even at odds with other eugenics approaches, local approaches, when applied, were comprehensively applied. For example, the selection of Indigenous peoples' marriage partners and work programs were controlled by protectors and mission managers. For some, racial mixing was prevented. For others, racial “whitening” was promoted. In the latter case, by continuing to send fertile women on work placements with mainstream families where rape was common (despite well‐documented missionary and parliamentary criticism, see Choo, 2001) and then subsequently preventing the resulting lighter skin offspring from marring anyone with darker skin (Glowczewski, 2008), the skin of many Aboriginal people was deliberately lightened over several generations. In the language of modern genocide theory, this was a form of multi‐generational ethnic cleansing.

10. See “Great Chain of Being,” Ranzijn et al. (2009).

11. Due to the exclusion of Indigenous people from higher education until very recently the concerns regarding Australian and German pre‐war eugenics programmes by Indigenous people can only be established by the symbolic gestures made at the time. Despite the restrictive living conditions at the time the first International delegation to complain about the treatment of Jewish people in Germany in the World War II era was attempted by an Aboriginal delegation. William Cooper, Yorta‐Yorta man and leader of the delegation to the German Embassy in Melbourne has been formally commemorated by the people of Israel for his efforts.

12. The term “decolonise” in this context means the process of peacefully removing pernicious colonial practice that continue to distort or occlude genuine cultural practice (see the Decolonisation Movement).

13. Scientific racism refers to the use unsound scientific techniques and hypotheses to justify racial profiling and attributions of superiority or inferiority based on race. The origins of adopting scientific racism to guide measurement in psychology can be traced to Frances Galton who developed his methods and founded eugenics using a method first developed by a criminologist. Galton was also one of the first to write about the control of marriage as a eugenics strategy. Scientific racism is associated with pseudo science, racially motivated hypothesis reflecting stereotypes, confirmatory research design, racial typography, and profiling.

14. Pan‐Aboriginality amalgamates all Aboriginal cultures into a single group, thereby erasing crucial aspects of identity specific to discrete Aboriginal peoples, whereas Aboriginal peoples see themselves as culturally unique and different to their Aboriginal neighbours (Glowczewski, 2008). Pan‐Aboriginality is an imposed construct that assumes a heterogeneity that has not been demonstrated empirically.