See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  There was no shortage of government funding in Bourke. Ferguson saw millions of dollars pour into the town for large service providers – but all that money did nothing to improve the crime rate. Dozens of services had been set up, but they worked mostly in isolation, rarely cooperated, and competed for clients.

  Back in 2009, Ferguson led a community charge for alcohol restrictions, which substantially reduced the severity of violent assaults. He then turned to working with other community members to find a new approach to lowering Bourke’s crime rate – but what? The answer came when Ferguson discovered a program in the United States that was getting remarkable results. Called ‘justice reinvestment’, this prevention model directed funding away from the endless spending on prisons, and towards services that stop crimes from happening in the first place, and prevent people from reoffending. Ironically, this was implemented by Republicans in Texas, a state with the nation’s highest incarceration rate. They shelved plans to spend $523 million on 14,000 new prison beds, and instead invested in substance abuse treatment, mental health programs and support for prisoners after they were released. The results were stunning: parole revocations were cut by 25 per cent, and the prison population growth was 90 per cent below the projected rate. It saved the state hundreds of millions, and five years into the program, Texas closed a prison for the first time in its history.31

  To see if justice reinvestment could work in Bourke, Ferguson invited the not-for-profit group Just Reinvest NSW to a community town-hall meeting. Together they decided to create working groups for three areas: early childhood; children aged eight to eighteen; and the role of men. With the help of philanthropists, they established a central working hub called Maranguka (Ngemba for ‘caring for others’). In 2015, they devised an innovative strategy, to be led by the newly formed Bourke Tribal Council, chaired by representatives of all twenty-two Indigenous language groups living in Bourke. A huge achievement in itself (Ferguson calls it a ‘treaty’), the council, with help from then Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda, put factional differences and historical grievances aside. Then, to bring young people on board, they set up a council chaired by local kids.

  Ferguson was adamant: justice reinvestment wouldn’t be just another program being imposed on the Bourke community – it would be their program. Every Indigenous expert I’ve spoken to says this kind of community-building, beyond its impact on crime, is in itself a powerful way to overcome the dislocation and disempowerment at the core of domestic abuse.

  While the High Point program only targeted known abusers, in Bourke, the intervention was starting a lot earlier: with boys and young men at risk of becoming perpetrators. As in High Point, though, the Bourke strategy couldn’t begin without data. To get a clear picture of how and why young people in Bourke were being arrested and jailed, Maranguka and Just Reinvest had to gather data that had never been collected before. It provided them with a map of what was happening in their town: for instance, the fact that 62 per cent of youth offences were being committed between 6pm and 6am, and 42 per cent on weekends.##

  What they were searching for in this data were the ‘circuit breakers’ that would stop boys being criminalised. At the top of the list: Bourke led the state in driving offences for people ten to twenty-five, especially unlicensed driving. The reasons for this were painfully obvious: limited access to registered cars, literacy issues with written driving tests, and not enough licensed drivers to teach them. Here was a basic problem with a straightforward solution: Maranguka raised money for a car and paid a local to teach young people to drive. When the demand for lessons surged, eight off-duty police officers volunteered as instructors. It’s hard to quantify the effect of this on a young Aboriginal person – to have a police officer volunteer to help you, not harass you. But the other effects can be quantified: there was a 72 per cent drop in the number of people under twenty-five arrested for unlicensed driving.

  Wherever they saw gaps or problems, Maranguka stepped in to fix them. To help students who were violent or disruptive in school, Maranguka teamed up with Bourke High School to run Our Place, which takes young Aboriginal men outside traditional learning environments and teaches them literacy and numeracy through practical work experiences, like building fences and shearing sheep, and cultural ones, like making didgeridoos and clapsticks. Some of these students were also appointed to the Youth Council, where they could be the eyes and ears of their community and come up with ways to solve problems affecting their friends and families. After the program was introduced, school attendance for Our Place students rose 25 per cent, and suspensions dropped 79 per cent.

  What the Maranguka model had built in from the start was an understanding that no one program or approach would single-handedly reduce domestic abuse, or any of the town’s other intractable crimes. ‘You have to address those underlying causes,’ says Ferguson, now the founder and executive director of Maranguka Justice Reinvestment, ‘everything from housing to employment and the limited opportunities in our community. You can’t do one thing without the other.’

  *

  Superintendent Greg Moore is a busy man: he leads the 45-strong police force in Bourke, and looks after the Darling River Local Area Command, which spans 180,000 square kilometres – roughly a fifth of New South Wales. Across this gigantic area, there are just 15,600 people, concentrated in the towns of Bourke, Brewarrina, Cobar, Nyngan and Warren. In 2016, all five were in the top fifteen highest domestic assault rates in the state.32 ‘There’s not a shift that goes by that the troops aren’t getting called out to domestic incidents,’ says Moore. It’s a top priority for Moore – and it’s not something he’s shy about. ‘I’m like a broken record on domestic violence. But I don’t make any apologies for that – it’s had a big impact on our community … We see kids from these families out at night committing offences, or becoming victims themselves.’

  Though Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up around a quarter of the population, they perpetrate 90 per cent of the violence.33 Moore refused to take this family violence for granted. ‘Some people used to say quite distressing things to me, things like, “Oh, it’s just black love.” It’s like, “No, it’s not part of your culture, it’s a loving culture, and we need to get away from that tolerance that you can do violence to your family.”’

  In 2016, inspired by Maranguka, Moore decided his police had to stop doing the same thing each time and expecting a different result. It wasn’t enough merely to respond to domestic violence callouts – they had to start preventing violence before it occurred. Moore had a simple idea: his officers would make house calls to known perpetrators and victims, especially those who were ‘high-risk’. He wanted police to do two things: check that they were complying with protection orders, and – more radically – assess what could be done to improve their lives.

  Like the police in High Point, Moore started with a complex data analysis of their known victims and perpetrators, classifying those they saw as high-risk. He knew, however, that identifying the most dangerous would require more than raw numbers. ‘Maybe it’s a first-time offender, but often you just get a sense – from your own observations and the risk factors – that this person is an extreme risk, and that maybe this perpetrator isn’t going to comply with the orders.’

  Once he had the data, Moore dispatched his police to do spot checks on families and couples that had domestic violence orders in place, especially those deemed high-risk. During their visit, police would talk to the victim and perpetrator to figure out what kind of help they needed – from job-seeking, substance abuse and mental health treatment, to assistance with parenting. Then they’d come back to the family with local people or service providers who could help them. But to shift the old model, Moore had to educate his staff and bring them with him. ‘It wasn’t about just telling the staff what to do, but why we’re doing it.’

  One perpetrator – an alcoholic who regularly beat his wife – was havin
g police called out every week. ‘What we were doing wasn’t working,’ says Moore. So he partnered with a local Aboriginal man, a role model in Bourke, and brought him along to the next visit. Sitting with the perpetrator, this man told him straight: ‘This stuff used to be tolerated, but it’s gotta stop. You’re on the radar with the local crew, and you’ve gotta stop belting up Aunty, because it’s not on.’ The pair visited him on several occasions, ‘and we sort of wore him down a bit. He was a good fella, his triggers were there … he just couldn’t handle his grog.’ Eventually, he agreed to go along to a men’s group ‘to have a yarn about things’. The men’s group was a Maranguka initiative – a place for men to talk about grief and loss, to focus on healing and to reconnect to country. ‘Often there’s some unresolved trauma or something like that, so it can be a form of group therapy without them even realising it.’ When Moore spoke to me, it had been more than a year since police started working with this man. There hadn’t been a repeat incident since.

  For Bourke police, this is not just a new operation – it’s a revolutionary shift. Moore doesn’t want people to wait for problems to start in order to get police involved: ‘We’re encouraging people, once they start identifying that they have some challenges or difficulties, to reach out and make contact.’ The message is: we don’t want to punish you. We want to protect you.

  *

  So what happened to all those service providers, working away in isolation and competition? Maranguka brought them together and got them to cooperate. Unlike the High Point working group, which convenes once a fortnight, Maranguka goes a lot harder – they meet almost every weekday. ‘We have 24-hour check-ins now, with a strong focus on domestic violence,’ says Ferguson. At 9.30am, Monday to Wednesday, people from Maranguka meet with Bourke police at the Maranguka Hub to discuss any domestic incidents that have occurred in the past twenty-four hours and how best to respond. Does someone need to go and talk to a perpetrator? Do they need help with substance abuse? Mentoring? Employment? What is happening for their partner and children? Each case is talked about in detail, and solutions workshopped. The point is to act early so cases don’t end up in court. On Thursdays, the group expands to include all the relevant NGOs and government agencies who, like a triaging medical team, work together to devise the best strategies to help the clients they share. ‘It’s proven to be quite a success,’ says Ferguson. ‘We’re addressing things almost immediately, instead of allowing them to fester.’

  *

  Bourke is the first major justice reinvestment program to run in Australia. What’s happened there is nothing short of revolutionary. When I first saw the statistics, I could barely believe what I was reading: by 2017, domestic violence–related assaults in Bourke had dropped by a jaw-dropping 39 per cent. Other crimes are also down: drug-related prosecutions (39 per cent), driving offences (34 per cent) and non-domestic-violence-related assaults (35 per cent).34 It’s no coincidence that Bourke has seen increases in other areas: a 31 per cent increase in students completing Year 12, for example.35 Aboriginal people have been pleading with governments for decades to let them do what’s best for their own people. Bourke is living proof that self-governance – carefully planned, evidence-based and community-owned – works.

  When it comes to domestic violence, there’s no question that Bourke Police’s Operation Solidarity – combined with the holistic approach of Maranguka – is also working. Across the Darling River Local Area Command, domestic homicides dropped from seven in 2016 (when Operation Solidarity began) to zero for the following eighteen months. By 2018, the repeat victimisation rate – which was twice the state average – was also down by a third. Victims have greater trust in police: the number who cooperated with police to pursue legal action is up, from an average of 68 per cent in 2016 to 85 per cent in 2018. And even with this increased legal action, the conviction rate has remained above the state average, at 75 per cent – something Moore puts down to the fact that their prosecutor has been trained to properly understand domestic abuse.

  These results are stunning, but Moore isn’t content to hang his hat on them. ‘We’re also looking at other measures, like hospital admission rates, Centrelink domestic violence–related crisis payments, and child removals. I think they’ve only had one child removed in the Bourke LGA [local government area] in the last twelve months, and eight across the whole [Darling River] area. That is historically low.’

  This didn’t require some big government spend. No extra resources were needed for Operation Solidarity; it was integrated into daily duties. That is the whole point of justice reinvestment: you spend money in the short term to save it in the future. It is estimated that the Maranguka-initiated changes led to a $3.1 million saving in 2017. If the project can maintain even half of the 2017 results for the next few years, the saving over five years is likely to be $7 million.36

  ‘Bourke was fairly targeted and identified as one of the most dangerous communities in the world,’ says Ferguson. ‘It’s not overly ambitious now to think we can become one of the safest communities in the world.’

  *

  The models in High Point and Bourke are exciting – and not just because they have reduced domestic abuse. These programs work because they are community-led; they generate deep collaboration; they see perpetrators as individuals capable of rationality and redemption; and they make victim protection their number one priority. While traditional systems make victims responsible for protecting themselves, both High Point and Bourke hand that responsibility back to the community and the police. As David Kennedy explains, ‘We are regularly in the situation in which a woman, whose name we know, is being terrorised by a man, whose name we know … We should not ask her to put herself at further risk … we should make him stop.’37 The High Point model, with its tough criminal justice approach, does not want to see more perpetrators in jail – it wants them to choose to stop their abuse, and stay free. The message is clear, though – staying free means doing what they have to do to stop their abuse. If they can’t make the rational choice to stop abusing, the full force of the law will descend on them, guns blazing.

  What is especially promising about these models is the way they centre on collaboration. We waste criminal amounts of money on programs that run in isolation. So many programs are just tiny drops in the bucket – they’re funded to run for a few weeks or months, and do little to nothing to ensure victims and their families return to health and safety. The models in High Point and Bourke don’t exist at the whim of political cycles – they are there for the long term, maintained by community ownership, close collaboration and a common goal. This is not just good practice for reducing domestic abuse – it is a model for tackling intractable social problems.

  But these models are not one-size-fits-all. They are ‘place-based’ solutions, which means they must be adapted to the unique conditions of each town or city. That takes time. Conflicts must be dealt with, common ground must be established and strategies must be developed. No doubt there will be many who find fault with the programs in High Point and Bourke, and point out the challenges of transposing programs from one place to another, from America to Australia, from small towns to big cities. But my intention in this chapter is not to imply that there’s one silver-bullet solution, nor to suggest that these are the only programs worthy of praise. Courageous people around the country are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and getting remarkable results. If we were to become really serious about ending domestic abuse, and devote the resources necessary to do it, the results could be spectacular. It would, in my opinion, be one of the greatest nation-building exercises in Australia’s history.

  For those who still don’t believe it’s possible to reduce domestic abuse now, consider this: five years ago, few could have imagined something like #MeToo: a revolution not just against sexual harassment, but against patriarchy itself. Even that dishevelled alt-right culture warrior Steve Bannon – a booster for fascists and white supremacists – acknowledge
s it as the most radical movement of our time. ‘Time’s up on ten thousand years of recorded history,’ he told Bloomberg. ‘This is coming. This is real.’38

  Revolutions are impossible, until they are inevitable.

  *Daniel Andrews, ‘Unprecedented investment to end family violence’, Media release, Premier Daniel Andrews, 2 May 2017.

  #Stephanie Anderson, ‘Domestic violence: Daniel Andrews vows to overhaul “broken” support system after commission report’, ABC News (online). 30 March 2016.

  †The long-term impact of random breath-testing, though not as dramatic, was still substantial: for nearly five years after it was introduced, there was a 24 per cent decline each year in single-vehicle night-time accidents.

  §As we’ve seen, statistics on domestic abuse don’t tell the whole story. But there are statistics that can indicate whether progress is being made: domestic homicide, to cite the most obvious.

  ‡In 2011, 18,800 Australians died from smoking-related diseases, amounting to fifty preventable deaths every day. That makes smoking the leading cause of preventable disease and illness in Australia.

  **It’s not so clear-cut in Australia. Research from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research shows that around a third of offenders convicted on a domestic violence–related offence between 2008 and 2017 had no other kind of conviction. However, 64.5 per cent of offenders did have at least one other non-DV conviction. In the main, these convictions were for fairly low-level crimes, like traffic offences (28 per cent), but there were also those with histories of theft (28 per cent) and drug convictions (15 per cent).