‘Huge influx' of Aboriginal women, victims of family violence wrongly arrested by Victoria Police

Police are wrongfully accusing Aboriginal women of being perpetrators of family violence when they are the victims, locking mothers up and separating them from children, lawyers say.

The Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service acting director Juergen Kaehne said it heard cases, most often in regional areas, where police declared Aboriginal households “violent” without any qualification.

Misidentification was a systemic problem within Victoria Police, with officers relying on a code of practice that invited gender biases and stereotypes to identify “predominant aggressors”, Mr Kaehne said.

The vast majority of Aboriginal women in Victoria have non-Indigenous partners, including 85 per cent of women in Melbourne, the Yoorrook Justice Commission was told on Thursday.

Aboriginal women were 45 times more likely than non-Aboriginal women to experience family violence, likely at the hands of white men.

“One of (police’s metrics) is how fearful a person is,” Mr Kaehne, told the inquiry.

“Obviously that’s an easily manipulated thing when the person is clever, articulate, usually white, calm, and the mother is not — she’s hysterical.

“Another thing they look at is the historical pattern of violence and in regional households, police just say, ‘that’s a violent household’, so they just pick someone.”

He told the inquiry authorities also look at the “nature” of a person’s injuries, “not once considering whether those injuries are defensive ones”.

“So the man rings the police with a scratch on his face and says, ‘look what she did’, (while) she’s hysterical in the background and so the police pick him as the person in need of protection (and her children).”

Police’s assumptions were driven by racism, Mr Kaehne said.

The service’s managing lawyer, Emily Yates, said the criminal team saw a huge influx of women accused of family violence.

Child protection often intervened when women were accused, the service said.

One woman in a regional town was defending herself and a relative against a man who was attacking them both, when the woman stabbed him in the leg to flee to safety, Ms Yates said.

The woman ended up in a months-long criminal court battle, and was at one point arrested for other shoplifting offences and remanded in custody away from her children, the lawyer said.

The woman’s charges over the stabbing were ultimately withdrawn on a self-defence basis.

“It was an incredibly traumatic experience,” Ms Yates said.

“She was not a violent person, and was accused of that probably because she’s an Aboriginal woman and wasn’t believed in the first instance by police, and then also by prosecution.”

Ms Yates said body-worn cameras should be mandatory for police officers and the family violence notices they issued against Aboriginal women should be automatically reviewed.

The legal service also called for more funding for Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to fight family violence against Aboriginal women, who chief executive Nerita Waight said did not fit the “sympathetic victim model”.

Police were responsible for a unique form of violence against Aboriginal women, whereby their status as genuine victims was devalued, Ms Waight said.

“As a result, they are often over-policed as people who use violence, but they’re under-policed as (victims),” she said.

Yoorrook is Australia’s first truth-telling inquiry and forms part of Victoria’s treaty process.