The Katherine region has been identified as a ‘cluster region’ where girls as young as 11 are committing suicide, a children’s commissioner says.
Dr Howard Bath said girls would now account for a previously unheard of 40 per cent of all suicides of children under the age of 17 - an unprecedented rate in Northern Territory indigenous communities where family violence is rife.
Mr Bath said the increase in young female suicides coincides with an epidemic of marijuana use and a staggering rise in the number of Territory Aboriginal women being admitted to hospital as a result of violence.
“Aboriginal women are being hospitalised for assault at 80 times the rate of other women. It beggars belief”, Dr Bath said. “Exposure to violence greatly increases the risk of a person taking their life.”
Dr Bath said he believed the proportion of indigenous girls committing suicide in the Territory was now the highest in the Western world.
While in New South Wales, with Australia's largest indigenous population, the youth suicide rate is one young person in every 100,000, in the Northern Territory it is above 30.
A 2011 report by the NT’s child deaths and prevention committee found that over a recent four-year period, 62 children under the age of 17 died from “external causes”.
About one-third were classified as intentional self-harm or “accidental threats to breathing”.
An NT all-party parliamentary committee inquiry into youth suicide has uncovered alarming incidents of unreported suicide and heard
evidence from researchers claiming suicide figures in the Territory were seriously understated because of imprecise data collection.
The committee appears likely to accept a recommendation from the Menzies School of Health for a register of suicide deaths to facilitate the policy response of police, government and mental health agencies.
Committee chairwoman Marion Scrymgour said she had been aware of the need to treat suicide with sensitivity because many remote communities affected had tiny populations and the trauma had been overwhelming.
But she said excessive
secrecy had resulted in a limited national debate about the impact of suicide in the Territory at a time when the rates were regarded as among the world's highest.
"It is far better to talk about it, to get it out in the open, because we need to work out a national response," she said.
"Young women are hanging themselves, overdosing and attempting suicide and there is nobody to talk to. Suicide has always been regarded as a men's problem, but clearly that is no longer the case.”
The committee has been told suicides of young people have occurred in so-called clusters in East and West Arnhem, Katherine and Central Desert communities.
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