Death of nine-year-old boy renews alarm over Indigenous suicides
Police investigators say the circumstances of the death in Queensland are ‘non-suspicious’, but relatives believe death was accidental
Police are preparing a report for the coroner into the death of the boy, aged nine, in Emerald. Photograph: Quentin Jones/AAP
The death of a nine-year-old Indigenous boy in central Queensland is not suspicious, police investigators believe.
The known circumstances of the death raise the possibility that it was one of Australia’s youngest suicide cases. The boy was found behind his home, weeks after an uncle killed himself.
Call for radical change after 13 young Indigenous suicides in Kimberley region
Police investigators have deemed the death of the boy, in Emerald in the central highlands, was “non-suspicious” and are preparing a report for the coroner.
But the Guardian has been told relatives of the boy believe his death was accidental.
His family are receiving support from the National Indigenous Critical Response Service, which has been funded by the federal government since December.
A police spokesman would not confirm the circumstances in which the boy was found or whether investigators were examining the possibility of suicide.
The youngest confirmed cases of suicide have involved an Indigenous girl aged nine in remote South Australia in 2012, and an Indigenous boy of the same age in Broome in 1998.
Earlier this year in remote central Australia, three Indigenous children – the youngest six years old – attempted suicide together, suicide researcher Gerry Georgatos told the Guardian. Georgatos said child suicides were rising “and they’re getting younger”. Indigenous children make up 30% of those below 17 and 80% of those below 12.
“To lose children at 9, 10, 11 should be unimaginable but there is a crisis in this nation that is getting worse,” he said. “This horrific toll is an abomination – moral and political.”
A coronial inquest into the suicides of 13 young Indigenous people – five of them aged 10 to 13 – in Western Australia’s north over less than four years heard in June that the problem had “reached disturbing proportions”.
Georgatos said a common factor in Indigenous suicides across the country was that “nearly 100% of the suicides were of people living below the poverty line”.
The suicide rate in Indigenous people living above the poverty line was less than that among non-Indigenous, he said.
- Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14. Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467. MensLine Australia 1300 78 99 78. Local Aboriginal Medical Service available from vibe.com.au
We should weep, but more importantly we should act to stop Indigenous suicides
I have sat with hundreds of families in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities that have lost loved ones to suicide. They are crying out to be heard
In the last few years I have written more than 300 articles on the suicide crisis and on suicide prevention. In those same years I have supported hundreds of suicide affected-families and thousands of critically at-risk individuals. In my view, understanding why one has suicidal thoughts should be our most pressing need.
We are losing at least 3,000 Australians to suicide each year. More than one quarter of the national suicide toll is comprised of migrants, particularly of relatively newly arrived migrants from language diverse backgrounds. Refugees who have endured immigration detention are at elevated risk to suicide. The suicide rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, one in 18 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths is a suicide. However, because of under-reporting issues and circumstances where there is an inability to gather adequate evidence to satisfy the coroner of a suicide, I estimate that rather one in 10 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths is a suicide.
The nation should weep, but more importantly should act, when 80% of suicides of children aged 12 years and less are of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children.
We do not need endless research to identify the elevated risk groups or the ways forward. We know them. We only need to disaggregate. If we don’t, we discriminate; we leave people behind.
The most elevated risk group to life-threatening aberrant behaviour and to suicide are individuals who as children were removed from their biological families, followed by former inmates, the homeless, foster children, the chronically impoverished, newly arrived migrants, culturally and linguistically diverse migrants, and LGBQTI people.
Impoverishment is one of the more significant risk factors that leads to suicidal ideation. Aberrant behaviours and depression are more pronounced among the impoverished. The more education someone has completed, the greater the suite of their protective factors to steering clear from suicidal ideation. The majority of the national prison population has not completed year 12 – in fact the majority have not completed year 9. High levels of education are a more significant protective factor than full-time employment. More education translates to a dawn of new meanings, to a better understanding of the self, to a more positive psychosocial self, to the pursuit of what happiness and its contexts can and should mean.
Identifying trauma in any given population must recognise underlying narratives, and from within these narratives consequently understand the triggers that can lead to serious depression, disordered thinking – to the tipping points.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicides are predominately borne of poverty and disparities. I have travelled through hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and with many of these communities the poverty is third-world-akin. Many of these communities have been degraded from missions and reserves to corrals of human misery and suffering; where hardly anyone completes year 12, where few have any serious employment, where all hope is extinguished.
That this should be their lot is an abomination – moral and political. The degradation of these communities is not the fault of the communities but the fault of our governments.
Very few Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders living above the poverty line kill themselves. The improving of life circumstances for impoverished and disadvantaged Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is the only way forward to reducing one of the world’s highest suicide rates. More needs to be done for the impoverished, for those without hope.
The multifactorial issues that lead to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicides are the same that lead to the abominable arrest, jail and homeless rates of Aboriginal peoples. Today, one in 13 of Western Australia’s Aboriginal adult males are in prison. Prisons are filled with the low-level offending borne of the tsunami of poverty-related issues.
In my time in the tertiary sector, I assisted many former inmates and homeless individuals into education, gaining entry to an educational institution and hence in supporting them from the point of entry to the point exit. None of those souls I assisted landed back in jail or on the streets.
Of the world’s middle and high income nations with recent colonial oppressor histories, Australia has the widest divide in all measurable indicators between its first peoples and the rest of the population.
For all Australians, whether they are descendants of the first peoples, newly arrived migrants from culturally diverse backgrounds, or marginalised Australians, there is an accumulation of stress that we never before had in our nation. There is also an unprecedented capacity of hate today. It plays out in racism, in competition, in general unhappiness and degenerates into hate, anger, mobbing and bullying. The constancy of these traumas can become irrecoverable for some.
We cannot continue to live in silence and dangerously internalise this tragedy. The hundreds of suicide affected families I have sat with, who have lost their loved ones, are crying out to be heard, they are screaming.
Self-destructive behaviours that can culminate in suicidal behaviours are preventable.
I remember the suicide affected families and those lost who continue to echo in the hearts of those they have left behind. I remember children lost to suicide, as young as nine. We need education to lead with the knowledge that at all times we need to be civil, courteous, kind to one another. We have to be there for one another – people need people.
We should tell the stories of those lost. Let us be fearless in this, for in the telling of their stories the imperatives of the ways forward will be reinforced.
I remember a father who found his son hours after his suicide. The father lay his son down and cradled his body through the night till responders arrived in the morning. I remember the distraught family of a young man who only a week before his suicide had run into a burning house and rescued a young mother and her baby. I remember attending the funerals of three young people in the one community – three burials in five days, three graves in a row. The youngest was a 15-year-old girl. I wailed on the inside as I stared at three graves. I remember a father of six children who took his life, a mother of five children who took her life, a pregnant mother who took her life. I remember a 10-year-old child who took her life, an 11-year-old boy who took his life, a 12-year-old girl who took her life.
As a nation we lay claim to responding to the suicide crisis. We are one of only 28 nations with a “suicide prevention plan”. But it’s paper-thin. It’s about encouraging services to work together in suicide prevention and postvention. We are nowhere near it. As a nation we have not prioritised this harrowing crisis.
As a young child I remember the absorption of sadness by some of Sydney’s Greek community of the suicide by a newly-arrived young Greek male. Years later I would read some of his letters to the homeland, yearning to return after he made his quid in a country he believed found it hard to accept him. This is the tale of many newly-arrived migrants albeit to one of the world’s most culturally diverse nations. Racism has many veils and layers and misoxeny and xenophobia are toxic. Today, in my work with suicide affected families and my research, in my many journeys I find that there are more stresses today than yesterday, more unhappiness today than yesterday.
Identifying trauma and understanding the issues that despair individuals and collectively as families are imperative in tailor-making the education, the conversations and the support. We start with behavioural observations and proceed with the opportunity for the individual to tell their story.
What makes for unhappiness and happiness has to be understood – human beings are inherently courageous. People want to choose happiness but a muddle-minded society has been getting in the way. The factors that can culminate in suicide are the most preventable of the various destructive behaviours that impact on families and communities.
Understanding one another, understanding unfairness, helping one another, being there for one another are the most profound steps to suicide prevention. We have to spread the love and do this with a salt-of-the-earth approach. We must lead by example in making sense of the world, in supporting others to improve their life circumstances and to understand happiness.
- Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 in Australia, the Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK, and the National Suicide Prevention Hotline on 1-800-273-8255 in the US.
If the Kimberley was a country, it would have the worst suicide rate in the world
By Nathan Hondros
3 August 2018 WA Today
If Western Australia’s remote Kimberley region was a country – and with an area of half a million square kilometres it’s big enough to be one – it would have the worst suicide rate in the world.
Data released by the federal government this week on the causes of death for Australians between 2012 to 2016 has revealed a higher suicide rate in the Kimberley than in any other part of the nation.
And in the Kimberley, which includes towns like Broome, Kununurra and Halls Creek, the suicide rates are higher than Sri Lanka, Guyana and Mongolia, the nations with the worst rates in the world, according to the World Health Organisation.
For Gerry Georgatos, who coordinates a team of support workers helping Aboriginal families in the wake of suicide, this is not news.
The overwhelming majority of people taking their own lives in the Kimberley are Aboriginal.
In 2016, a report published in the Medical Journal of Australia found the suicide rate for Aboriginal people in the Kimberley was seven times the rest of the country.
Mr Georgatos said about nine out of 10 suicides in the Kimberley involved Aboriginal people.
“The huge driver of suicide in the Kimberley is crushing poverty,” he said.
Western falls on the King George River in flood in the remote North Kimberley of Western Australia.
“Despite the affluence of many doing well in the Kimberley, despite affirmative actions and investments in infrastructure in the Kimberley, the reality is that the Kimberley also has the second highest homelessness rate in the nation.
“More than six per cent of its total population is homeless and nearly 100 per cent of that are Aboriginal people which then translates to almost 12 per cent or one in eight of all Aboriginal people in the Kimberley living with some form of homelessness.”
Almost all Aboriginal suicides are committed by people living below the poverty line, Mr Georgatos said.
“The elevated risk groups are people who’ve been incarcerated and come out of prison with little hope on the horizon who are Aboriginal, people who are homeless and Aboriginal, people who have been evicted from their public housing rentals who are Aboriginal,” he said.
“Within that poverty other sad factors become much more pronounced.
“That’s where you get the family violence, various sexual predations and that sort of behaviour that become tipping points.”
Coroner inquires into Aboriginal suicides in the Kimberley
WA Coroner Ros Fogliani launched an inquest into the suicides of 13 young Aboriginal people in the Kimberley in 2017 (her findings are yet to be released).
The children died between November 2012 and March 2016, roughly the same timeframe covered by the latest figures released by the government.
Mr Georgatos said there had been six Aboriginal suicides last financial year in the Kimberley and, even though this was about half the number of the previous year, five were teenagers aged 15 to 17.
“That’s a disturbing and increasing trend, but despite the suicide toll decreasing in the last year – and pray that continues – that doesn’t reflect in hospital admissions for self-harm, attempted suicide and police call-outs for aberrant behaviour, which have continued at the same rates,” he said.
The coroner heard harrowing details at inquest hearings in Perth and across the Kimberley, including the story of a 10-year-old girl her took her own life on the same day she was struck by a relative with a stick.
She was last seen walking away in tears.
She had been exposed to alcohol abuse and domestic violence and did not have any contact with mental health or counselling services, according to counsel assisting Philip Urquhart.
Overall, there had been more than 700 recommendations arising from 40 inquiries into Aboriginal youth suicide and related factors since the early 2000s.
Mr Georgatos said he wasn’t hopeful another inquest would change things.
“They all come back with a limited remit of responses and unless they come back actually focusing in on the crushing poverty, then you’re going nowhere fast,” he said.
“Everybody can argue ‘mental health’, everybody can argue ‘more responders’, everybody can argue everything they want under the sun.
“Obviously, it all helps in some way to some extent, but how can you give people hope and ask them to adjust their behaviour, and for how long and how far, without a path leading to something better on the horizon?”
Governments direct resources into North West suicide prevention
Both the state and federal governments say they are concerned about suicide rates in the Kimberley.
A 2016 WA parliamentary inquiry flayed WA governments of both political persuasions, finding they had “failed to respond to recommendations made by previous inquiries for more than 15 years”.
Commonwealth Indigenous Affairs Minister Ken Wyatt said he had been working closely with community and health groups from across the region since early last year.
“I am saddened by the profound impact that suicide has on individuals, their families and communities,” he said.
“Through the Kimberley Suicide Prevention Trial, the Turnbull Government is committed to suicide prevention, with a focus on strong community engagement and respect for locally endorsed solutions.”
POVERTY THE OVERWHELMING CAUSE OF INDIGENOUS MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES
The National Indigenous Mental Health and Wellbeing Conference kicked off today in Perth. Speaker at the conference Gerry Georgatos discusses his work lifting disadvantaged people out of poverty and how it can help indigenous suicide rates.
Gerry Georgatos: Lifting Aboriginal people out of poverty will bring less suicides
ABC RADIO INTERVIEW ON YOUTH SUICIDE AND SUICIDE PREVENTION; WITH JOURNALIST NADINE MALONEY
Suicide of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders - A Humanitarian Crisis
