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Boy, 6, stabbed to death
06/07/2007 11:40 - (SA)
Sydney - A six-year-old boy was on Friday stabbed to death in an Australian Aboriginal camp, two weeks after Prime Minister John Howard ordered a crackdown on violence in indigenous communities.
The death, which comes hard on the killing of a three-month-old baby in another settlement, follows Howard's decision to send police and military to Aboriginal camps in the Northern Territory to protect women and children.
Howard seized control of 60 Aboriginal communities in the territory and has urged the states to follow his example and implement a strategy to stop drug and alcohol-fuelled violence which includes bans on booze and pornography.
Locals in the Queensland community of Cherbourg said the town had been shocked by the death of the six-year-old in an incident which also claimed the life of a 24-year-old woman, thought to be the dead boy's aunt.
"They were both subjected to stab wounds," a police spokesperson told AFP.
Police are interviewing a 23-year-old woman, believed to be the boy's mother, over the incident which also saw a seven-year-old girl taken to hospital with serious injuries.
Cherbourg community leader Bertie Button said the camp shared the same problems as many isolated settlements in the Northern Territory.
"There's a lot of neglected children walking the streets at night," he told Australian Associated Press.
"It's alcohol and drug-related but there is also frustration because people see no other way out."
He said the scene of Friday's attack had been the site of another murder.
"In the last three to four years we've had three or four murders here," he said. "There was another bloke stabbed and killed in that same house about two years ago."
The Cherbourg violence follows the death of a three-month-old baby girl in a remote Northern Territory community earlier this week from severe head injuries.
A 17-year-old boy, the child's father, has been charged with manslaughter.
The Northern Territory government on Thursday announced it would ban alcohol from camps around Alice Springs from August in its own response to the problem.
- AFP
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