Abstract: Within the Australian Indigenous community, family violence is commonly used as a broad term, encompassing all forms of violence between members of a kinship group or the immediate community. Concomitantly, abuse of Indigenous children, and particularly sexual abuse, is generally viewed as a community issue, rather than within the narrower nuclear family context used in the non-Indigenous community. The two bodies of knowledge (child abuse within the Indigenous and non- Indigenous communities) also differ in terms of their 'ways of knowing' - knowledge on Indigenous issues frequently coming from personal experience.
Notes: Western Australian Government Inquiry into Responses by Government Agencies to complaints of Family Violence and Child Abuse in Aboriginal Communities