Understanding colonisation and trauma

This chapter is concerned with understanding child sexual assault within an Aboriginal context, particularly within the impacts of colonisation and trauma. There is a great deal of non-Indigenous research about child sexual assault, but little concerning Aboriginal child sexual assault. Researchers have noted that 'The current framework for understanding child abuse and neglect is located within the white western world, where the vast majority of research has taken place'. The dominant non-Indigenous model locates child abuse within a 'personal dysfunction model', but Aboriginal people locate child sexual assault within the wider definition of family violence, framing violence less as personal dysfunction than as a consequence of the impacts of colonisation, specifically historical and inter-generational trauma.