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This article focuses on a study to understand family violence among the Indigenous communities of Australia. The author explains that analyzing the social issues experienced by indigenous Australians from the perspective of colonization, oppression and dispossession has long been known to be fundamental to sound social policy. The study was commissioned in 2001 by Weena Mooga Gu Gudba Inc., an Indigenous women's organization in Ceduna, South Australia. The aim of the study was to understand family violence in the Aboriginal community. Ceduna is a remote town in western South Australia with a population in 2001 of around 3500 people, 24 percent of whom are Aboriginal. This article informs that at least two of the research team, including at least one Aborigine, conducted each interview and focus group. Most interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, with detailed notes being taken of the others, the workshop and the forums. Participants experienced family violence as incorporating and embedded in many forms of violence. The study also found that forms of violence include physical, emotional and material violence towards women and children.

Competing discourses have always figured prominently in policy debates about violence against women and children. Legislation and services to address it have largely been developed from theory and empirical knowledge of domestic violence occurring in intimate relationships. Knowledge from an Indigenous perspective about family violence, embedded in a context of colonisation and involving a broader range of relationships, has been less influential. One of the consequences of this is that when Indigenous communities identify solutions to address family violence holistically, these solutions are difficult to implement. Research with a remote South Australian Aboriginal community, looking for ways to reduce the level of family violence, resulted in new understandings of it. Linking issues of economic deprivation, dispossession and the breaking down of culture, the community devised a holistic community development approach to reduce family violence. This paper identifies the waves of understanding about family violence and argues that community-initiated solutions must be supported by policy and funding options based on an Indigenous understanding of family violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]