Australia Cracks Down on Aborigine Child Sex Abuse

Widespread sex abuse of Aboriginal children was a national emergency, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard said.

Widespread sex abuse of Aboriginal children was a national emergency, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard said on Thursday as he announced sweeping measures to tighten controls over remote indigenous communities.

Prime Minister John Howard said his government would ban alcohol in remote Aboriginal communities and impose strict new limits on welfare payments to try to ensure Aboriginal children were safe from abuse and alcohol-related violence.

"This is a national emergency," Howard told Australian parliament. "We are dealing with a group of young Australians for whom the concept of childhood innocence has never been present. That is a sad and tragic event.

"Exceptional measures are required to deal with an exceptionally tragic situation."

Howard said the prohibitions would apply in the outback Northern Territory but urged state governments, over which he has less constitutional control, to match them across the entire country.

The dramatic intervention reversed a decade of allowing Aboriginal communities to largely govern themselves and comes a week after a new report found child sexual abuse was widespread.

A "river of grog" or alcohol was destroying indigenous society, the government-sanctioned report "Little Children are Sacred" found.

It said sexual abuse by both black and white men of Aboriginal children, some as young as three, often went unreported.

Aboriginal society was being destroyed by alcohol, which was the gravest threat to the safety of indigenous children in the outback Northern Territory, the report said, with alcohol often used as "a bartering tool" to procure children for sex.

Australia's 460,000 Aborigines make up about 2 percent of the country's 20 million population. They are consistently the nation's most disadvantaged group, with far higher rates of unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, and domestic violence.

Alcohol causes the death of an Aborigine every 38 hours, with one in four of the deaths in the Northern Territory.

Throughout his 11 years in power, Howard has targeted practical measures to improve Aboriginal disadvantage, often angering critics with his tough-love approach at the expense of symbolism, such as an apology for past injustices.

Howard on Thursday said his government would use its constitutional power to override Northern Territory laws.

Alcohol would be banned in Aboriginal communities for six months, while every Aboriginal child under the age of 16 would undergo a medical check. Extra police would be deployed and pornography outlawed, with computers searched for x-rated images.

At the same time, the government will demand half of all welfare payments to parents in Aboriginal communities must be spent on food and essential items, while school attendance will be linked to welfare support.

The national government will also take control of Aboriginal townships to improve housing and clean up run-down communities to make them safer and healthier.

In 2004-05, 21,863 people were taken into police protective custody in the territory. Between 2001 and 2004, there were 2,000 assaults and 110 sexual assaults per year due to alcohol.