Gender, Genocide, and Indigenous Peoples: Aboriginal Australians
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Gender, Genocide, and Indigenous Peoples: Aboriginal Australians
Sociology as a discipline has always been slow to get involved with Holocaust and genocide studies since it was with the approach and practice of human rights. Irving Horowitz suggested that when it narrows down to factors such as human rights genocide and violations, many researchers tend to feel that the topic “Genocide” may be unfit for any further scientific discourse (Horowitz, 1993). Sociology, as a discipline, has never been a significant element in informing people’s comprehension of genocide as a concept or practice.
Many years before actual sociological commitment to genocide studies, the Holocaust was perceived as an ideal example as some even regarded it as the only reliable example when referring to genocide. Due to this bigotry towards the Holocaust, connected scholarly emphasis on The UN Convention, a significant perception of genocide emphasizing on the issues of mass killings of specific groups under a state directive was provided. Moreover, sociologists started to significantly contribute toward genocide studies with some of the regularly cited descriptions of the term ‘genocide’ that are from sociological studies since the 90s; a publication of Leo Kuper’s seminal text was conducted in 1981 (Waters, 2015).
Throughout several debates concerning genocide, main issues have been on various perceptions, some of which include the following: determining vulnerable groups capable of being victims of genocides and the impact of gendered genocide to a group. Regarding potential victim groups, for instance, Palmer finds out that the UN Convention’s description does not include special groups such as the disabled and the LGBT community; however, such groups seemed to be targeted by the Nazi and some political groups (Palmer et al., 2000). Policies of the UN Conventions regarding Genocide tends to hinder the attempts to prevent gendered genocide since it does not seem to acknowledge the harsh experiences that women undergo during the genocide.
Aims and objectives
Aim
This research paper aims to address and seeks to answer the question of the Gendered Genocide of Aboriginal Australians. The study involved reviewing various relevant literature with the emphasis of formulating themes from the outcome to be applied later by other scholars.
Objectives
The following objectives will be achieved:
- To identify various ways in which women fell victims of genocide
- To determine how gender was incorporated by the perpetrators to plan and commission genocide
- To highlight recommendations for future studies
Research Questions
This research’s core concerns lie in evaluating the Gender, Genocide, and Indigenous Peoples: Aboriginal Australians as a case study, and specifically, in the evaluation of the Gendered Genocide and its prospects. The specific research questions guiding the study are as under:
- How did Article II of the UN Convention of 1998 transform the perception of genocide?
- What are the views of scholars, typically social scientists, regarding their definitions of gender genocide?
Methodology
The research used a qualitative method to collect relevant data. The study makes use of pertinent articles such as Article II Genocide Convention Report 1998 to retrieve more information on the topic under study. These secondary sources helped in identifying previous concepts and theories in the past, which could be relevant to the study. The study, however, showed the scarcity of relevant journals on the topic because of the least amount of studies that have previously been conducted on the Gendered Genocide.
However, the study also noted that there some committed scholars such as Raphäel Lemkin, who attempted to find an all-inclusive meaning of genocide. He also formulated the phrase relatively in response to the Nazi policies of structured murder of the Jewish population at the time of the Holocaust and to also react to various instances of history that aimed at harming a specific group of people. His work was relevant during the research process.
A stratified random sampling process was employed for choosing the relevant sources of data. The method was effective because of it for the fair representation of the materials required for the study. Afterward, each document was analyzed based on its original purpose.
Literature Review
Raphäel Lemkin initially defined the term “Genocide” from Poland in 1944. He formulated the phrase relatively in response to the Nazi policies of structured murder of the Jewish population at the time of the Holocaust and to also react to various instances of history that aimed at harming a specific group of people. Raphäel Lemkin further advocated having genocide codified as an international crime against humanity. In the 90s, gender tended to be part of legal, academic, and activist strategies to interpret genocide due to the convergence of events (Edwards, 1981).
The United Nations General Assembly (A/RES/96-I) originally coded genocide as a crime under international law in 1946. Genocide was also recognized as an independent crime in the 1948 Genocide Convention. All states are obliged as a matter of laws based on the principle that genocide is a crime veto under international law, and no derogation is permitted, as stated by the ICJ. The description of the crime of genocide, as stipulated in Article II of the convention, was due to debating procedure and unified consent among the United Nations member states.
The definition of the term ‘genocide’ is stipulated under Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Based on the current Convention, genocide is referred to as “any act which is perpetrated with intent to destroying whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group (LeBlanc, 1988).” Some of those intended actions (dolus specialis) may include the following: instilling physical or mental harm to a member of a specific group; maiming and killing members of the group; intentionally causing on a group situation of life structured to physical damage it; imposing directive or policies meant to stop births within the group, and moving the children of the group in a coercive manner to another group. LeBlanc (1988), Article II of the Genocide Convention, entails a description of the crime of genocide, which involves mental elements and physical elements.
Krieken (1998) provides his own version of the definition of cultural genocide as ‘the harm by a savage manner to the particular features of the targeted group.’ He also demonstrated that cultural genocide was not merely forced assimilation; however, it was aiming at attaining a swift and absolute extinction of the moral, social and religious life of a specified target group of a population.
Findings
Gendered Genocide: Aboriginal Australians
Indigenous Australians are descendants from a group of individuals who had stayed in Australia and its immediate surrounding island before the introduction of European colonization. In Australia, there are two groups of Indigenous people, which include Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. The Aboriginal Australians are connected to groups native to Australia. Legitimately, “Aboriginal Australian” is acknowledged as an individual of Torres Strait Islander or Aboriginal descent and is admitted like that in his or her society.
Gender tends to be one of the factors that tend to permeate the crime of genocide. The perpetrators get to incorporate the issues of gender when planning and to implement the intentional act, which results in genocidal violence. It is due to such gendered calamitous actions that the perpetrators apply to optimize the crime’s harmful effects on the targeted groups such as Aboriginal Australians group. Moreover, the crime committed discriminatively against men, and boys have continuously been referred to as genocidal violence.
The male and female members of marked groups by the violator’s own design seem to undergo genocide uniquely based on their gender. Men and boys are the focus of interest due to their gendered roles that they play in their community, such as leader, protectors of the group from external attacks, and to maintain the group’s identity and household heads. On the other hand, women and girls had distinctive roles as wives, bearers of future life, family honor, and community keepers and providing labor within the homestead. The basic comprehension of the meaning and differences to being either a male or female of a specific community seemed to enable the perpetrators to enhance the conception of themselves and their target groups.
Additionally, the type of violence that was aimed at girls and women in the time of genocide was informed by the existing societal attitudes towards female members (anti-feminism), and the effects were further facilitated by the social and cultural inequalities of female members of the society. For instance, the gendered genocide could perhaps apply effectively for the Aboriginal Australians since the women were mostly target due to their gender role as the bearer of the future, and they were enticed to crossbreed with the white men.
The violators with the intent to harm a protected population tend to commit a crime with the conception of societal structures and composition of the targeted group in which the genocide is happening. Before initiating the genocide on the Aboriginal Australians, the perpetrators get to design a plant with a full understanding of the group’s cultural components, such as the roles of women in the group. For instance, the male would be eliminated to ensure that they do not breed anymore. Again, the perpetrators understood the role that children play in the future, and they sought to move the children and distancing them from their identity. Gender has always played a significant role in the crime of genocide; however, it has never been evident or proven.
The comprehension of genocide as a crime committed via structured mass executions, most of the victims tend to be the male members of the target group. For instance, Aboriginal Australians male members would be targeted and killed to limit their numbers since they could be perceived as a threat and would revolutionize due to their role as protectors of the society and the group’s identity; this made them be maimed and killed. Nonetheless, there has been a refusal to acknowledge the multi-faceted female encounters of genocide and those males not chosen for elimination. Instead, non-killing acts of genocide are more likely to be directed against female members of the targeted group and are occasionally deleted from the span of genocidal violence.
The crime of genocide is basically founded on the violators’ view of their surroundings and the place of their victims. The understanding of a target group’s social fabrics significantly informs perpetrators’ view and detriment of the social, political, economic, and cultural compositions of the world around them. Nonetheless, due to an exclusive understanding of the interplay between gender and genocide, intentional acts are designed and implemented. Genocidal strategies had significantly compromised gender-specific traumas that were harmful to the victims of the group.
Genocide is described by its act of killing a member of a group. The killing is majorly occurring to men and boys. Moreover, Genocidal killing is a considerably gendered activity as men and boys killed for a varied reason to that of women and girls. In case, female members of a group are marked for genocidal execution, and the killings seem to reflect the gendered perception of the roles of women and girls in that specific community. For instance, the Aboriginal Australians women would be targeted and either maimed or killed because of the role that they assume within their society as the bearer of the future.
During the genocide, Aboriginal Australians women and girls would be abducted and kept as sex slaves or even coerced to offer labor in the homes of those fighting. Additionally, gender could further inform the manner of killing women who were old or could not bear children would be killed or even maimed. On the other hand, the killing of the male member of the Aboriginal Australians group was informed by the perpetrators’ perception that men and boys have some level of social, political, and economic power in their society.
Gender tends to diffuse the crime genocide. Gender factor is incorporated into violators’ planning and execution of intended genocidal violence. The female member of groups seems to experience genocide in distinct ways.
Assaults on women and girls are designed due to their roles as wives, bearers of future, and keepers of the society. Nonetheless, the violence aimed at women and girls during the genocide is associated with the existing attitudes towards women in the society, and the effects are aggravated by the social, financial and cultural inequalities of women and girls.
The constant failure to realize the complications of genocidal violence, and the comprehensive ways in which genocide is planned and conducted against women based on their gender tend to undermine the development of appropriated structures to mobilize the Genocide Convention’s legitimate duty to prevent genocide.
Women were major targets during the genocide. The women were perceived as the protector of the Aborigine community and the bearers of the future. The women were sexually violated to crossbreed with the white men and others taken as sexual slaves. For instance, there are approximated at hundreds of rape as sexual violence was used as a weapon on women during the genocide; however, most of the ever recorded statistics do not account for the number of rape that the women and girls suffered. Similarly, Rohingya women were made to watch the persecution of the male relative; and in Rwanda, some Tutsi women were coerced to butcher their sons to save other members of the family (Rao, 2018). Even though some women had survived the various genocides, they had suffered severe mental harm.
Outline of the status of Aboriginal Australians
The indigenous people of aboriginal are the custodians of the most of diverse territories in Australia, and their cultural and traditional practices have continued to be of value to the humankind for historical heritage within and outside Australia (Jones, 2000). Aboriginal Australians have continued to suffer from marginalization and discrimination on sharing the country’s wealth and resources. They have been displaced from their traditional land, which has undermined their livelihoods, pushing them to continue suffering.
Poverty has coupled the life of Aboriginal Australians living in remote areas; this has resulted in poor health conditions. The high level of debt has made it difficult to make healthy food choices due to very minimal choices of fresh food and a very high cost of food productions. The prices of food in remote Australia are due to the high cost of transportation and costly machines used in agricultural sectors, which cannot be purchased by the Aboriginal people. The high rate of poverty has limited the availability and affordability of the health care services exposing people to different illnesses along with the indigenous Australians. With the inadequate health facilities, the rate of deaths for the adult and young people has increased continuously, reducing the general life expectancy of the group.
The health of a given population is being determined by different factors, which include the availability of food and primary health facilities, which in most cases, is lacking among the indigenous people of Australia (Altman & Nieuwenhuysen, 1979). There has always been indigenous health inequality, which is mainly characterized by a lack of primary health facilities and the lower health infrastructures amongst the Aboriginal Australians. The right of self-determination of a group of people will always involve their right to dispose of their natural wealth at will without interferences freely, but this has never been the case of indigenous people who have always been deprived of their natural resources. The Aboriginal land rights legislation in Australia has been the natural source of wealth for the indigenous people. Massive tracks of lands have been grabbed from the indigenous people exposing them to suffering and lack of agricultural land, which was to lift them from poverty and boost their economic strengths.
Chartrand (1981) the poverty and inequality of the indigenous people is a reflection of political treatment and historical injustices that were committed against them in the past. The persistent disparities that the Aboriginal people are experiencing to date can be connected to the systemic discrimination that the community went through in the past. The community suffered socio-economic status and imprisonment, which is directly linked the aboriginal deaths to date. This is assigned to the intergenerational problems which have been inherited from one generation to another. It is worth noting that the indigenous people of Australia have stressed the importance of the human rights-based approach, which is making them aware of their rights and responsibilities to help them improve their social and economic status.
Indigenous Reconciliation in Australia
The removal of Aborigine children led to great displeasure among the Aborigine community towards the Australian government. Due to the displeasures, the Story Books Movement was introduced by an advocacy organization (Australian for Native Title) as a way to encounter the acts such as the removal of Aborigine children. The organization further tried to address the negligence by the Australian government in initiating appropriate apologies to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups.
The Sorry Books were able to collect almost half a million signatures and significant apologies to the victimized populations. The books were meant to act as a token of apology from the Australian non-Indigenous people for the injustices such as genocide experienced by the Indigenous people in the Colonization era. Genocide may be evaluated regarding the activities, action, or intention. Committing to genocide crime involves both mental and physical elements (Schabas & Schabas, 2000). Additionally, Schabas stated that the legal description of the Genocide Convention (1998) tended to identify the difference between actions and intentions of genocide.
Ian Kershaw further analyzed the issue of the actions and intent of genocide in the case of Hitler’s Holocaust. In his discussion, he argued on the idea between ‘Structuralism’ and ‘Internationalism.’ It highlights the intentions and aims of the transgressor that majorly count concerning genocide, while Structuralism analyses that in most cases of genocide, the initial intentions were never genocidal but rather as excesses of various policies by the government.
The Forced Removal Policy of Aborigine and mixed-race Aborigine children can be perceived as a systematic and intentional genocide. The policymakers needed to forcefully assimilate and alter the ethnic identities of the Aborigine children via a well-ordered policy structured to manipulate their identities. Different strategies were employed to execute the policies, for instance, Crossbreeding were encouraged in which there was a marriage between mixed-race women and white men (Australian White Settlers); the sterilization of all half-castes was also supported.
Nonetheless, cultural genocide in Australia was solely targeted on the Aborigine and mixed-race children to able to assimilate them into European civilization effectively. Regardless of the form that genocide assumes, whether mental or physical, genocide, a crime against humanity, and war are considered as some of the international barbarity crimes. Aborigines were frequently selected and liquidated because of their race, ethnicity and were perceived to impede civilization progress in Australia, especially in some places like Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria.
The British colonization of Australia was ethnocide and dangerous for the Aborigines (Moses, 2004). Nonetheless, the memory of genocide tends collectively configures the conduct of the Aborigine population towards the current government of Australia. The forced removal policy of Aborigine children made most of the children and the population to face trauma. Most of the removed children started to develop various signs related to mental health, for instance, most of them did not undertake post-high school education, they were mostly geographically mobile, and even had a lesser sense of their Aboriginal cultural identity.
Why Aboriginal Australians Group Is Continuing To Experience Genocide
Currently, only 3 % of Australia’s population has Aboriginal patrimony, which is the foundation of their heritage. Aboriginal Australians are always striving to sustain their ancient social of life and seek recognition from the government of Australia (Altman & Nieuwenhuysen, 1979). The society needs to be sovereign. The group still experiences modern genocide in various forms. There is frequent sexual abuse of the indigenous children due to the weaker fabrics of their culture. Many essential services, such as quality education, still do not seem to reach the Aboriginal communities, and thus they become even more vulnerable.
The process of migration has made many communities occupy the land. The land tends to be their crucial commodity as a society. The active engagement in their land is aimed at the continuity of preventing genocide since they tend to protect some of their sacred sites and maintain a link with their ancestral land.
The Aborigine children were the main target of the Colonial government since the young Aboriginal servants offered labor cheaply and were not being paid. The children could also be easily sexually exploited; they were sexually abused during the genocide. Additionally, the children were a major target of the forced removal policy since they were believed to be easier to assimilate into European civilization.
Conclusion
Many indigenous societies have evolved over time based on their lands. The convention, which Lemkin initiated, described genocide as ‘a criminal act directed against any one of the groups described above of human beings, to destroy it in whole or in part or of preventing its preservation or development.’ The Australian government has had a bad history with indigenous peoples based on its colonial relationship. The government had had a structured way of discouraging and avoiding maintenance of indigenous people’s culture; it regularly disposed of their lands and facilitated cultural assimilation. Currently, the government still eliminates the indigenous people their ancestral lands via judicious use of corporate interest groups to make sure that indigenous groups do not go against the so-called “development.” Moreover, there are so many regulations that tend to violate international laws based on discrimination. It is fascinating to figure out why there is a persistent violation of Aboriginal Australians population rights.
References
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