Foetal alcohol syndrome should be recognised as disability, says report on Indigenous alcohol use
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Version 0 of 1. A significant number of Aboriginal children are falling through the cracks of the education system and later landing in prison because foetal alcohol syndrome is not recognised as a disability in Australia, a national report on alcohol use in Aboriginal communities has found. The House of Representatives standing committee report, Alcohol: hurting people and harming communities, recommends foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) be formally recognised as a disability for the purpose of welfare benefits and providing teachers’ aides, and recognised as a cognitive impairment for the purposes of criminal culpability. The report also recommends governments adopt a justice reinvestment strategy in predominantly Indigenous communities as a more effective way to keep people out of prison and reduce intergenerational alcohol abuse. Related: Michael Kirby: Indigenous disadvantage bigger problem than recognition Liberal MP Sharman Stone, who chaired the committee, told Guardian Australia a lack of formal recognition of the condition meant that children with FASD, which manifests as impaired brain development, were either misdiagnosed and treated as being on the autism spectrum, or not treated at all. FASD is not listed as a condition that qualifies for extra teaching support. Teaching support is offered for children with a mild intellectual disability – an IQ of between 55 and 70 – but children with FASD often fall just outside that range. “If you are born with this condition you are really pretty much all alone,” Stone said. “We also know that if you are born with this condition, early intervention is key.” Stone said steps such as providing a stable, quiet, routine-based environment had been shown to greatly improve the long-term outcomes of people with FASD. But because of the behavioural problems it brings, “the child is lucky if they’re even allowed to continue to attend a chaotic classroom.” Outside school, children with FASD are more likely to come into contact with the justice system and are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse. “If you have impaired judgement, if you can’t manage your behaviour, your emotions, if you have a repeated pattern of antisocial behaviour because of brain damage, then you’re liable to be picked up as an offender from a very young age,” Stone said. “People with FASD are also very easily led, they’re not easily able to exercise judgement. “Is it fair and right that a person like that is treated as if they do have full facilities in terms of their capacity to plead?” Related: Fitzroy Valley praised for response to scourge of foetal alcohol syndrome Stone said lack of appropriate treatment options had led to unjust solutions, such as in the case of Rosie Fulton, a 25-year-old Aboriginal woman who spent two years in a Kalgoorlie jail after being declared unfit to stand trial because of mental impairment caused by FASD. Fulton was released and returned home to Alice Springs following a community campaign last year. “This is a very serious problem. It’s about human rights,” Stone said. “And some people, despite understanding the tragedy, say [prison is] probably the safest place for people affected by these conditions, because at least they’re not being assaulted, they’re not being sexually assaulted, and they have a roof over their heads. “This is a tragic circumstance, where the safest place for a big proportion of the people suffering this position is to be incarcerated.” Stone said while it might be politically popular to be “tough on crime”, a justice reinvestment approach, such as that trialled in the NSW town of Bourke, would be more successful. “It is just ridiculous to suggest that it is not more sensible to assist Aboriginal Australians to grow up and have more fulfilling lives than to say when the wheels fall off, we’ll build more jails.” she said. “It’s too late in every sense. Their life is already compromised.” Amnesty International also recommended a justice reinvestment approach and recognised FASD as a disability in a recent report on youth imprisonment, which found that Aboriginal children were 26 times more likely to spend time behind bars than non-Indigenous children. Related: NT mandatory alcohol rehabilitation has 'little evidence' to justify it, say health experts National rates of FASD are not known, but the piecemeal studies available show rates are higher in Indigenous communities. The most comprehensive figures come from a community-led study in the Kimberley in Western Australia, which found that one in eight children born in the Fitzroy Valley had some degree of brain impairment related to FASD. Stone said it was likely those rates were repeated in similar communities across WA and the Northern Territory. The federal government has invested $9.2m in a national FASD action plan, a third of which will go to developing a reliable way of diagnosing the condition, but Stone, who was involved in developing the plan, said it was “going very slowly. It really needs to be ramped up before we run out of money.” At the moment, the work is mainly being done by regional Aboriginal health services, many of whom are struggling for long-term funding. Jane Cooper and Jenni Rogers run the FASD prevention program at the Ord Valley Aboriginal Health Service in Kununurra, about 1,040km from Broome and 600km from Fitzroy Valley. They told Guardian Australia that education, not alcohol restriction, was the key to reducing number of women drinking while pregnant, and therefore reducing the prevalence of FASD. “We have had that for quite some years, controlling supply – you can’t buy alcohol on a Sunday – but we haven’t seen a reduction in the behaviours or the violence,” Cooper said. “If anything, I think it’s worse,” Rogers said. “If you have restrictions to alcohol there are different drugs and choices. And also there’s a lot less money going home because of the sly grogging – instead of $58 for a carton they are handing over $150. And people do that willingly, and we’re already in poverty.” Rogers said their program targeted women in their “childbearing years” (taken to be 13 to 45) as well as women who were already pregnant, to teach them about the risks of drinking while pregnant. She welcomed the recommendations in the report, saying that lack of appropriate services made the current outcome “pretty bleak”. “The school system is not designed for a FASD brain,” Rogers said. “You walk into a classroom and it’s beautiful, it’s bright, but a FASD brain doesn’t know how to settle itself down. It needs quiet, repetition, so they’re branded disruptive and told to sit in the corner. “They’re also the fall guy with police. They want to be accepted, they want to be involved, and they have poor judgment.” Cooper said reducing alcohol abuse, and therefore rates of FASD, would only work if it was driven by the community. |