Culture matters: Forensic issues for Australian Indigenous peoples

Extract:

There has clearly been an extensive amount of scientific focus on Indigenous peoples in the 200 plus years since colonisation. There were many early scientific expeditions, work done by linguists and anthropologists, followed by the involvement of legal practitioners in land rights claims or those working in the health and mental health fields. More recently too, criminological attention has been paid to the interactions of Indigenous Australians and the processes of the criminal justice system largely because of the disproportionate number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples being dealt with by justice agencies. And, of course, in addition to direct scientific intervention there has been the involvement of a range of professionals in implementing policies and programs to deal with what has been termed 'the Aboriginal problem'.