Kumanjayi Haywood was murdered by her former partner, who set their home on fire, trapping her inside.
Ngeyo Ragurrk was murdered by her former partner, who viciously beat her to death.
Miss Yunupingu was murdered by her former partner, stabbed to death.
Kumarn Rubuntja was murdered by her partner, who ran her over with his car.
These four Indigenous women were at the centre of a landmark inquest into their deaths, presided over by Coroner Elisabeth Armitage, who spent a year investigating the domestic violence murders.
All of the women had shared how they feared for their lives with authorities or loved ones in the weeks, months and years prior to their murders.
All four perpetrators were known to police and had histories of family violence.
Kumanjayi , Ngeyo, Miss Yunupingu and Kumarn are four of 82 Aboriginal women killed in domestic violence attacks since 2000.
If their names aren’t familiar to you, there’s a reason for that — a reason Judge Armitage has called Australia’s “national shame”.
“… the deaths of Aboriginal women in the NT does not evoke the same reaction [as non-Aboriginal women interstate and] is indicative of systemic racism in the way their voices go unheard; the belief that these women are somehow less deserving of our grief, outrage and our collective response,” she said.
Calling on the media to pay more attention to the rates of domestic violence in the Northern Territory, Armitage made 35 recommendations, calling for a significant funding boost to the sector — including for frontline emergency service responses and women’s shelters.
The NT has Australia’s highest rates of domestic and family violence, and a rate of intimate partner homicide seven times that of the national average.
Over the past decade, NT Police Force recorded a 117 per cent increase in the number of domestic violence related calls.
In the past five months, eight women from the Northern Territory have been killed in alleged domestic violence attacks.
Of the 82 women murdered since 2000, around 93 per cent were Aboriginal, with Aboriginal women 40 times more likely to be hospitalised for domestic violence.
The court also heard that up to 80 per cent of the NT police’s entire workload related to DFV, accounting for more than 882,000 hours in one year.
Source: The landmark DV news that barely made the headlines.