{"id":3477,"date":"2023-02-12T04:04:44","date_gmt":"2023-02-12T04:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/?p=3477"},"modified":"2023-09-25T04:53:48","modified_gmt":"2023-09-25T04:53:48","slug":"violence-and-defying-the-enemy-within","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/2023\/02\/12\/violence-and-defying-the-enemy-within\/","title":{"rendered":"Violence and Defying the Enemy Within"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Enemy Within\u2014Identity<\/h1>\n

Joe Williams runs a program called ‘Defying The Enemy Within’. Joe is a proud Wiradjuri\/Wolgalu, First Nations Aboriginal man born in Cowra, raised in Wagga NSW, Australia.\u00a0 I first encountered Jo through his appearance on The Drum, talking about ‘the enemy within’.<\/p>\n

I am the mother of mixed race sons.\u00a0 My children’s father, Charles Lepani, is from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea.\u00a0 I met and married him when I was a student of sociology at UNSW, and where he was a student of Industrial Relations on an ACTU scholarship. I went to live with him in Port Moresby in February 1972, a few months before I gave birth to my eldest son, Genou Lepani. Four years later my second son, Justin Lepani was born.\u00a0 I registered them at birth as Australian citizens so that they would have the option of where they lived in their later life.\u00a0 After their father and I separated in late 1978, my sons came to live with me for three years in Sydney before then returning to live with their father and his new wife in PNG. Genou returned to live with me when he was thirteen, to go to high school.\u00a0 Justin went with his father to Hawaii, when he moved there for three years to take up the position of Director of the East West Centre, before then joining Genou and me to start high school in Australia.<\/p>\n

Both their father and I have been committed to helping them have a sense of identity that is at home in both countries.\u00a0 However as many mixed race people know, this is not always easy.\u00a0 An Australia that prides itself on being the world’s most multicultural society should make this easier.\u00a0 Still, issues of identity remain contentious for those who do not easily ‘fit’ for reasons of ethnicity, religion or gender.<\/p>\n

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It was my own exposure to Trobriand Island society that first introduced me to other possibilities for masculine identity.\u00a0 On my first visit to the village I encountered men wearing lots of ‘bilus’ – ornamentation in the form of necklaces, earrings, hair ornaments, and woven arm bands with perfumed flowers. They were also readily seen walking along the road with small children on their hips, while their women folk walked alongside them carrying food and other items in woven baskets on their heads.\u00a0 At night the family gathered around to sing and talk.\u00a0 The men cried easily in both joy and sorrow, and one could hear the sound of the reed flute in the surrounding jungle as teenagers engaged in romantic encounters.\u00a0 Unfortunately since those days, Christianity, as the face of modernity, with its strange preoccupation with bodily covering and the repression of sexuality has taken its hold. I just hope the old spirit is strong and survives.<\/p>\n

While Joe’s work has been inspired by his own battles with suicide and mental illness, his work is also a powerful pointer towards the importance of redefining ourselves from within against the forces that can bear down so heavily upon us.<\/p>\n

His work speaks to issues that underpin masculine identity and domestic violence, as well as the lateral violence issues that can bubble up among groups who find themselves seething in frustration at their powerlessness.\u00a0 This particularly applies to Australia’s First Nations people, as a result of colonisation and displacement, but is not exclusive to them and is experienced by most people who experience marginalisation from the society around them.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.joewilliams.com.au\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Although forging a successful professional sporting career, Joe battled the majority of his life with suicidal ideation and Bi Polar Disorder. After a suicide attempt in 2012, Joe felt his purpose was to help people who struggle with mental illness. Through customised workshops Joe talks of dealing with adversities, struggles, resilience, addiction, connection, emotional wellbeing & healing trauma in schools, communities, correctional services, sporting clubs and workplaces.<\/p>\n

Joe was awarded the Wagga Wagga Citizen of the Year in 2015 for his committed work within the community mental health and suicide prevention sectors and was named a finalist in the National Indigenous Human Rights Awards. In 2018 Joe was awarded Suicide Prevention Australia\u2019s highest honour, a LiFE Award for his excellence in communities within the suicide prevention sector and in 2019 was named a dual winner of the Australian Mental Health Prize.<\/p>\n

Now a published author, Joe\u2019s autobiography \u2018Defying The Enemy Within\u2019 <\/em>shares not only his life\u2019s story but offer\u2019s practical tools anyone can implement into their lives to improve and maintain their emotional wellbeing. Joe also contributed to the book \u2018Transformation; Turning Tragedy into Triumph\u2019 <\/em>and features in the global documentary \u2018Suicide: The Ripple Effect\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

Domestic Violence<\/h1>\n

Increasingly we are facing that pervasive violence is a feature of domestic life for many families and intimate partners.\u00a0 And we have come to understand that the need for control is a strong driver of violence, often leading to homicide.\u00a0 In Australia one woman every week has fallen victim to domestic violence homicide, and we know that the situation in friendly New Zealand is even worse.\u00a0 Coercive Control is at the heart of domestic violence.<\/p>\n

Yet we are societies of relative security in terms of human rights abuses and invasion.\u00a0 Although that diverges markedly for First Nations Australians in terms of Australia’s criminal justice system, and in the pervasive and enduring racism that extends from the earliest days of colonial settlement and the frontier wars.<\/p>\n

Violence in Aboriginal Communities<\/h2>\n

The problem of alcohol fuelled violence in Alice Springs has received much media coverage.\u00a0 While many commentators are acknowledging that this problem is about more than grog, and is linked to enduring social disadvantage in housing and employment, the other issue that is not so readily acknowledged is the link between male identity and control in modern Australia and in many other nations.\u00a0 We see it playing out vividly in India and rape culture, and in gender discrimination in Japan and China. We also see male violence playing out in the emergence of the ‘manosphere’<\/a> as a global community of influence, among young men, as well as older men that targets feminism as the source of their frustrations over identity and social success.<\/p>\n

Senator Jacinta Price and Peter Dutton have made much of the issue of domestic violence and child abuse in Aboriginal communities to justify their opposition to recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Australian Constitution and enshrining their constitutional right for a Voice to Parliament on matters impacting their communities across the spectrum of Stop the Gap measures. These measures are about eliminating the socio-economic gap in education, housing and employment between Indigenous Australians and the rest of the Australian population.\u00a0 But there are deeper cultural and psychological issues at work that are not so easily encapsulated in these measure\u2014issues of intergenerational trauma and psycho-cultural violence by modern society’s ‘white clothes’.<\/p>\n

We have also recently seen a peak in youth violence and offending against property in a range of communities with high levels of First Nations people.\u00a0 All these factors are at play.\u00a0 Human beings need their identity to be honoured, they need social and spiritual purpose, and they need a loving and safe family environment to thrive. These issues are as foundationally important as educational performance and income.<\/p>\n

It is widely acknowledged that past attempt to Stop the Gap through expenditure programs administered by predominantly non-Indigenous bureaucrats at the Commonwealth and State levels have not achieved value for money.\u00a0 First Nations communities loudly proclaim they have the answers because they are close to the particular needs of particular communities, but that they are stymied by a series of pilot program with no guaranteed rollover funding, with all the funding soaked up by government administration costs.<\/p>\n

Furthermore we hear about ridiculous outcomes whereby a program that trained Aboriginal people in housing construction and fitout while actually building the housing was dismantled in favour of the punitive CDEP program whereby the ‘work component’ became a box ticking exercise for the Department administering unemployment benefits.\u00a0 And how soul destroying and disempowering this feels to communities<\/p>\n

Lateral Violence and Control<\/h1>\n

One of my Aboriginal friends where I live pointed me to the issue of lateral violence in Australia’s Indigenous communities.\u00a0 The Australian Human Rights Commission has analysed this issue for Australian Indigenous people. It explains that the concept of lateral violence has its origins in literature on colonialism from Africa and Latin America as well as the literature around the oppression of African Americans, Jewish people and women. The process of colonisation and other forms of oppression have their roots not only in the violent subjugation of groups but also more insidious forms of social control.<\/p>\n

Like the failed attempts at resistance in other colonised countries, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples found there was effectively no way for them to challenge the colonisers as their power and resources were too great. This frustration planted the first seeds of lateral violence.<\/p>\n

In order to establish power and control, the colonising powers positioned the groups being colonised as inferior to themselves, ignoring their basic humanity as well as their cultural identity, existing power structures and ways of life.<\/p>\n

The Commission outlines how the process of colonisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia explains how colonisation creates the conditions for lateral violence through:<\/p>\n