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aboriginal racism and discrimination essay
australian aboriginal people discrimination
australian aboriginal people discrimination
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Like what Justice Mclachlin mentioned above, it is clear that the government did not care much for their Aboriginal wellbeing and culture (Article). This mindset may also be shared amongst the police force as well as many missing aboriginal cases are often ignored as seen with the case of Daleen Kay Bosse (Video). However, despite criticisms placed on the police force for their lack of initiatives, according the Canada statistics, aboriginal women were equally as satisfied as their non-aboriginal women counterparts with the service of the police force (Brennan, 2011). Furthermore, within the same statistic, Mr. Brennan found out that Aboriginal women were generally comfortable with their safety and did not fear crime (2011). Lastly, when asked, …show more content…
They are often under-represented in the media despite them being over-represented in the criminal justice system (Gilchrist, 2010). This is because the media views them as lower rate citizens and since the media attempts to draw viewers, it has to present materials that are newsworthy (Gilchrist, 2010). What this means is that they have to consider to key points, spatial and cultural. Spatial is referring to the closeness of the offense so if the crime is occurring nearby, people will pay closer attention to it (Gilchrist, 2010). The other crucial requirement needed for a content to be newsworthy is "cultural proximity" (Gilchrist, 2010, p. 374) or in the other words, the victim 's views must be similar to those of the viewers (article). People normally care and react strongly to those who they can relate …show more content…
Since 1980, roughly 500 aboriginal have disappeared and many of them have been murdered yet they are rarely reported by the media (Gilchrist, 2010). Like mentioned above, the news media considers Aboriginal women to be lower tier than other races (Gilchrist, 2010). That may be why although significantly less common, reports of missing white women tend to be overly reported (Gilchrist, 2010). Furthermore, when a white woman goes missing, the media portrays them as innocent victims in order to elicit a stronger response from the viewers whereas aboriginal women, when they are reported as portrayed as invisible or often troubled people (Gilchrist, 2010).
The problem here is that should we blame the media for not representing these missing cases? The media is like any other business and as such it is perfectly normal for them to target news that will draw us viewers in. This shows that there is still some lingering racial and systematic discrimination against the aboriginals that stems all the way back to the European colonization
It would not be inconsistent with the principle of equality before the law that, where members of the Aboriginal race have special needs, those should be recognised by special rules laid down by the law. Further, the law is flexible enough to allow the courts to consider the special situation of an Aboriginal party where that is relevant. As the courts have recognised, the sentencing of Aboriginal offenders presents particular difficulties. Judges, in an attempt to do justice in discharging the difficult role of sentencing tribal and semi-tribal Aboriginal persons, have gone further. Clearly the ordinary criminal law is capable of facing these difficulties. It is neither necessary, nor desirable, to apply to the Aboriginal peoples the rules of their customary law rather than the general law. The attempt to uphold Aboriginal customary law is one aspect of the notion that the Aboriginal peoples will benefit if they continue to be treated as a class separate from the rest of the community, which must necessarily be a dependent and disadvantaged class.
Jiwani and Young's argument also causes me to consider Audra Simpson's talk, "The Chief's Two Bodies," in which she discusses both how and why the eradication of Aboriginal women was necessary to the development of patriarchal colonialist society. In short, Simpson acknowledges that through the creation "status," an arbitrary blood relationship to one's Aboriginal lineage, marriage, and scrip colonialist were able to remove land "ownership" from Aboriginal women, by essentially making them invisible. In effect, Jiwani and Young reinforce and provide evidence to suggest that ideologically, the concept of Aboriginal women being invisible or contrarily "hypervisable" (899), in that they are the antithesis of the "good" Christian women (the mother, the sister, the wife, the virgin) creates a binary. These apposing ideological women cause a "moral and racialized economy of representation [that] works to privilege dominate societal norms" (Jiwani and Young, 904). What is interesting about these discursive modes is the fact that news reporting itself is a colonialist practice rooted in economic stability. These modes maintains the cycle of violence and marginalization and only counter media rooted in art, such as the "Red Dress Campaign," or the "Walking with Our Sister's Campaign" which, bring awareness to the Aboriginal perspective can act as a retaliation to standard media
The topic for our research paper is oppression against women in the Indian Act. Discrimination against Aboriginal people has been a key issue for many years; however society generally skims the surface of this act and tends to give lip service to it without acknowledging the deeper issue of how these oppressions come with it. In the beginning of our research we quickly made a parallel between the oppression of Aboriginal women and the injustices they face and the breakdown in Aboriginal families and communities. As future social workers working from an anti-oppressive practice perspective the proposed research will help acquire the knowledge in building transformative politicized social work. Our team feels that by focusing on the female gender and how these women throughout history have been oppressed we will be able to perform our roles as social workers from a truly empathetic position; thus our future work with all aboriginal people will be more effective.
The Aboriginal Legal Services was an Aboriginal organisation generated by these activists to defend Black People’s rights and of families who passed away in custody. Across the country there have been many alarming deaths in prison and police custody which caused a real distress in the early 1980s amongst the Aboriginal community. During an investigation conducted by the RCIADIC nearly 99 deaths occurred in police custody in one average year. The difficult interaction between CJS and Aboriginal’s into Aboriginal Deaths in custody according to the Royal Commission has had an essential impact of
Despite the decreasing inequalities between men and women in both private and public spheres, aboriginal women continue to be oppressed and discriminated against in both. Aboriginal people in Canada are the indigenous group of people that were residing in Canada prior to the European colonization. The term First Nations, Indian and indigenous are used interchangeably when referring to aboriginal people. Prior to the colonization, aboriginal communities used to be matrilineal and the power between men and women were equally balanced. When the European came in contact with the aboriginal, there came a shift in gender role and power control leading towards discrimination against the women. As a consequence of the colonization, the aboriginal women are a dominant group that are constantly subordinated and ignored by the government system of Canada. Thus today, aboriginal women experiences double jeopardy as they belong to more than one disadvantaged group i.e. being women and belonging to aboriginal group. In contemporary world, there are not much of a difference between Aboriginal people and the other minority groups as they face the similar challenges such as gender discrimination, victimization, and experiences injustice towards them. Although aboriginal people are not considered as visible minorities, this population continues to struggle for their existence like any other visible minorities group. Although both aboriginal men and women are being discriminated in our society, the women tends to experience more discrimination in public and private sphere and are constantly the targeted for violence, abuse and are victimized. In addition, many of the problems and violence faced by aborigin...
...tely acknowledging missing/murdered Aboriginal women. For example, the infamous Pickton murders emphasize the extremity taken by local police forces to mask the violence and exclusion that Aboriginal women have faced. In this case, the perpetrator was the notorious Robert Pickton who became a global figure in mass media as the most atrocious serial killer in Canadian history. Jiwani and Young (2006) identify that when the bodies were discovered on the Pickton farm, many of Aboriginal descent, newspapers and journals were empathetic and seized the chance to illustrate the atrocity and horror of the crime. Yet, altogether the media failed to take advantage of any “opportunities for re-inscribing Aboriginality and relating these women’s experiences of alienation and abuse to systemic issues such as intergenerational trauma and residential schools” (Jiwani & Young 910).
Aboriginal communities experience oppression and live in quieter urban and rural areas. Due to this, they are not able to benefit from society’s organizations as the residents in the busy cities do. Therefore, they need more support from the city officials to be safe when experiencing violence. However, the communities they live in are not providing them with the resources to overcome violence. Functionalism explains the members need to benefit more from police forces; this helps emphasize that police officers must develop safer shelters and protocols. Meaning, they can create secure community buildings for the citizens to be protected in by a higher authority. Likewise, the officials are the only individuals who can attempt to stop the murders from reoccurring by solving the murder cases and charging the person. The police influence society’s wellbeing, and by not protecting Aboriginal community’s lives, they contribute to the deaths and society moves away from
Compare and contrast the arguments that have been advanced for and against the incorporation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Law in the criminal justice system.
Richard Harding, Roderic Broadhurst, Anne Ferrante, Nini Loh. 1995. Aboriginal Contact with the criminal justice system. Leichardt, NSW: Hawkins Press
No community in Canada comes into conflict with criminal justice system officials more disproportionately than Aboriginals (Dickson-Gilmore, 2011, p.77). Indeed, Aboriginal Canadians are often subject to both overt and unintended discrimination from Canadian law enforcement due in large part to institutionalized reputations as chronic substance abusers who are incapable of reform (Dickson-Gilmore, 2011, p.77-78). One of the more startling contemporary examples of this is the case of Frank Paul; a Mi’kmaq Canadian who was left to die in a Vancouver alley by officers of the Vancouver Police Department after being denied refuge in a police “drunk tank”. Not surprisingly, this event garnered significant controversy and public outcry amongst Canada’s Aboriginal population who have long been subject to over-policing and persistent overrepresentation as offenders in the Canadian criminal justice system (Jiwani & Dickson-Gilmore, 2011, p.43 & 81).
The idea that indigenous Australian communities are underprivileged and do not receive the same justice that the white community accrues is represented through Jay Swan and his interactions with the corrupt white police officers and the indigenous locals of the town. My empathetic response to the text as a whole was influenced directly by way the text constructs these ideas as well as my knowledge of the way indigenous Australians are represented in the mainstream media and the behaviour of the police force as an institution. These contextual factors and the way Sen has constructed ideas influenced me to empathise with the indigenous
Within Australia, beginning from approximately the time of European settlement to late 1969, the Aboriginal population of Australia experienced the detrimental effects of the stolen generation. A majority of the abducted children were ’half-castes’, in which they had one white parent and the other of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent. Following the government policies, the European police and government continued the assimilation of Aboriginal children into ‘white’ society. Oblivious to the destruction and devastation they were causing, the British had believed that they were doing this for “their [Aborigines] own good”, that they were “protecting” them as their families and culture were deemed unfit to raise them. These beliefs caused ...
... a socially defined group are treated differently, especially unfairly, because of their membership of the group (Kreiger, 1999). There are many facets to the issue of discrimination that affect the Indigenous Indigenous people, particularly the youth in the 21st century. Among these is the perception that Aboriginal’s are inherently lazy, alcoholic, dole (welfare) bludgers ( ). One factor that contributes to the portrayal of Indigneous people in this light and thus impacting on the relationship of the Indigenous community within mainstream society is the influence of the media (Stoneham, Goodman & Daube, 2014). The consistent representation of Indigneous people in such a negative view further perpetuates the racist stereotypes that were ______ which can have a major impact on the health and wellbeing of Indigneous Australians (Stoneham, Goodman and Daube).
Hollywood’s diversity problem is well-known; however, the extent might be surprising to most Americans. According to a 2014 report by the Center for the Study of Women in Television, Film & New Media, found that females comprised only 30% of all speaking characters among the top grossing films of 2013. (Lauzen, 2014) However, minority women faired far worse than their Caucasian counterparts. As a matter of fact, if one looks at the numbers even female characters from other world’s were as better represented in film than some minority women; the numbers are as follow for women: Caucasian (73%), African American (14%), Latina (5%), Asian and other world tied (3%). (Lauzen, 2014) If the lack of representation were not enough consider a 2009 study which found that when minority groups are portrayed on television the portrayal tends to be negative. (Alexandrin, 2009) A study by Busselle and Crandall (2009) found that the manner in which African-Americans are portrayed, often as unemployed criminals, tends to have an influence on the way the public perceives African-American’s lack of economic success. Furthermore, the news media does an equally poor job in the ways that African-American’s are presented; according to the same study while 27% of Americans were considered “poor” in 1996 the images of America’s “poor” being presented by news media was heavily Black (63%). (Busselle & Crandall, 2002) Today, this can be seen in the way that African-American victims of police brutality are depicted in the media. Even when African-Americans are murdered at the hands of police for minor and non-violent offenses (e.g. Mike Brown, Eric Gardner, and Tamir Rice) they are often portrayed as thugs, criminals, and vandals. What’s more, seve...
Supporting point: The Canadian Police views the Aboriginal community as a community that does not deserve protection because of high crime rates, instead they view it as the rest of the country needing protection from the Aboriginal community. The Canadian Police tends to do very little when an Aboriginal woman is reported missing, they often suggest the family to wait for the missing woman instead of taking immediate action. In addition, few police forces have special protocols they follow when an Aboriginal woman goes missing.