Digging deeper into data on Disappeared Aboriginal women

60 percent of Aboriginal women disappeared from urban centres; 80 percent of Aboriginal women were disappeared away from their communities

There is no current national dataset on the numbers of forcibly disappeared Aboriginal women in this country. Last month, a Four Corners investigation headed by First Nations women found 315 Aboriginal women had been murdered, disappeared or killed in suspicious circumstances since 2000. There has been an acknowledgement that Aboriginal women are going ‘missing’ at higher rates than the rest of the population, in every single state and territory. And yet, authorities are still not counting.

Finding the “the number of First Nations women and children who are missing and murdered”, is part of the terms of reference for the senate inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which is currently underway. In the lead-up to the inquiry, my colleague and Curtain the Podcast co-host Martin Hodgson, began investigating data based on the Australian Federal Police missing person’s database - the most comprehensive list of missing or suspicions disappearances in Australia. The significance of this list is that it includes people who have been ‘missing’ for more than a year, or for which there remains suspicion over their disappearance.

But despite the database including categorisation for ethnicity, it is never used to specify Aboriginality.

“They did not have a category for Indigenous people. So you have to go through every single individual to get an idea of whether the person is Aboriginal or not, and then start to look into their circumstances,” Martin told me on the latest episode.

Martin’s analysis found that 20 percent of women missing in Australia are Aboriginal women. Of these cases, 60 percent of Aboriginal women had disappeared from an urban centre (a town of more than 25,000 people).

Of these cases, over 80 percent of Aboriginal women had disappeared from a community that was not their own.

This suggests something that we previously hypothesised, that Aboriginal women were specifically vulnerable when they were away from their communities, away from their support networks, from where they were safe. Of the three cases of disappeared Aboriginal women who have been the subject of inquests from 2021-2022 in Queensland, all of the women had been disappeared away from their home communities.

This is important because it confronts the myth that the high rates of disappearance are occurring in remote communities - which has been latched onto by right-winged shock jocks and commentators to pathologise black communities as violent, rather than interrogating how Aboriginal women specifically are targeted for disappearance.

It also suggests a link to the criminalisation of Aboriginal women, and how incarcerating black women, and taking them away from their home communities can make them vulnerable to predators.

“Criminalisation, the dehumanising, and then the making the person so vulnerable, is putting them right into the clutches of violent criminals, white men, let’s be honest, in the cities of Australia,” Martin says.

“It also goes to something that’s much deeper. What if these women had never been criminalised in the first place and removed from their families?

“How much consideration is a judge taking - if we had a dataset as lawyers we could stand there and say: ‘your honour, are you really going to send an Aboriginal woman away a thousand kilometres away from her family and her support because she stole something of value of less than $50… and not only are you sending them to prison where we know Aboriginal people are die and are harmed constantly, but then upon their release, into this city… they are at an enormous risk, and here’s the data to show it? Are you willing to make that decision, are you willing to risk their life whether in custody or out, over something so trivial?’”

You can listen to the full episode in this post, or via Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.