Government data key to steering Indigenous youth away from crime: Maranguka Initiative
Indigenous leaders have sparked a quiet revolution by using data and community-led initiatives to dramatically reduce youth crime in the outback New South Wales town of Bourke.
The Bourke Tribal Council (BTC) watched their community suffer for decades from the remnants of dispossession, persistent racism, and institutional failures that left their Indigenous children and families vulnerable and unprotected.
These failures led Bourke’s Indigenous community to be overrepresented in the police and courts system for more than 20 years, including the highest rate of juvenile crime and domestic violence in NSW.
And it’s not just Bourke. Recent statistics show that Australia is facing a wave of Indigenous youth hyperincarceration, with increases of up to 48 per cent in detention rates in some states from 2021 to 2023.
To combat the impact of these social disadvantages on their community, the BTC partnered with Just Reinvest in 2013 to create the Maranguka Initiative. This project provides Bourke Elders with government data that paints a big picture about their young people’s contact with police, the causes, and their experiences with service providers such as health, education, and the criminal justice system.
Maranguka Initiative CEO Alister Ferguson said this data access allows them to shape their Growing Up Our Kids Smart, Safe, and Strong Strategy, an action plan packed with school programs and community led initiatives designed to eliminate contributors to youth crime.
“We look at the 2013 to 2014 financial period and what we found, which was no surprise, was that offences were occurring between 6pm to 6am, and that was at 62 per cent. And 48 per cent was on the weekend,” Ferguson said.
“So, we’ve expanded youth services from breaking down the nine to give mentality of service delivery and extended that to from five to nine and nine to midnight.”
Maranguka Initiative has used a holistic approach to building community strength, which involves community-led programs that provide crucial support for locals at each stage in their life to cut their contact with crime.
To target each age group effectively, Maranguka has created three programs with specific initiatives addressing their needs, such as early childhood and parenting, eight-to-18-year-olds, and the role of men.
While youth empowerment activities have been essential in reducing youth offending, Maranguka also focuses on diminishing childhood abuse and domestic violence as they are key contributors to young people’s contact with crime.
To achieve this, they have empowered Bourke men and fathers to become better role models for their children through greater clinical support for mental health, drug, and alcohol issues, increased employment opportunities, and building their role as community protectors.
By placing children at the forefront of local decision-making, and analysing what the service data is saying about their lived experiences, Maranguka has effectively diminished youth crime in Bourke, Ferguson said.
“Data has been critical in establishing and strengthening the approach through early intervention and prevention, and we’ve also now tacked on the preservation and restoration as to ensure young people are kept on country, in community as well as with family,” he said.
“It’s the dreams and ambitions and aspirations and expectations of young people that really need to be at the core of shared decision making, but that involves the family, caregivers, and parents as well.”
A 2018 Impact Assessment of Maranguka revealed that their initiatives from 2016-2017 resulted in a 23 per cent reduction in police recorded domestic violence and reoffending rates, a 31 per cent increase in year 12 retention rates, and 38% reduction in charges across the top five juvenile offence categories.
Core to Maranguka’s success has been its partnership with Seer Data & Analytics, an Australian technology company that has set up the Palimaa Database, which enables the community to access and share data from 15 service providers.
The Palimaa platform has allowed the BTC to enact Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS), which is the right of Indigenous people to exercise ownership over their own data. An example is how Palimaa has provided the BTC with multiple datasets about the community that were previously not public. This has allowed them to create evidence-based, community-led initiatives that places Indigenous voices at the forefront.
Watch the extended interview with Alister Ferguson above
Seer Data and Analytics CEO Kristi Mansfield said Palimaa’s data collection has been used extensively in Bourke’s local decision making and will be made available to other communities outside of justice reinvestment zones in accordance with IDS principles.
“What we’re really aiming to do with Maranguka is to take all their lessons learned through their data sharing agreements, their policies, the ways, and examples of how they use data across the community in many different ways that they interact with it and make decisions on it, and then make all of that available to other places who can then customize it and make it their own,” she said.
“When you give people access to data about them, which effectively they own, and they can control it, and they can control the narrative, then they’re more empowered to create solutions from the group up that actually make a difference.”
Listen to the full interview with Kristi Mansfield here
A recent report by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Dharriwaa Elders Group has urged for Aboriginal communities to have access to linked, administrative data about them, as it is a step towards achieving Indigenous Data Governance (IDG).
The report also revealed that some agencies have denied or hindered access to community data in the past, which highlights a huge failure of government entities in their role as data custodians and their Priority Reform 4 commitments.
UNSW Senior Research Fellow Dr Rebecca Reeve has called for processes to access data to be streamlined across government agencies. This is as it will give communities a better understanding of systemic issues contributing to the hyper-incarceration of their youth, which empowers them to advocate for change and inform community-led solutions.
“Looking more broadly at all of the institutional data that are linked and being able to track young people’s institutional contacts with different agencies, so how they interact with different agencies at what point in their life and what order those interactions happen to give a deeper understanding,” Reeve said.
“This is likely to uncover where there are unmet needs and where young people require more services or more support to enable them to thrive.
“Some of that might require systemic change, some of it will inform improving and building on community-led solutions.”
Watch the full seminar with UNSW researchers here
While some exchange and transfer of data has been occurring, Australian policies and legislation are yet to mandate it. This means that data collected about Aboriginal peoples continues to be predominately led by non-Indigenous researchers and government, which often leads to data portraying Indigenous communities in a negative light.
UNSW Senior Research Fellow Ms Peta MacGillivray said that these deficit narratives can be used by government to justify “punitive” lawmaking and law reform that are harmful to Indigenous communities.
“It seems to be business as usual in almost every state and territory to this very reactive politics-led reform and targeting of young people, which almost always involves targeting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people,” MacGillivray said.
“What all of that does is it distracts from the long-held and hard work towards the goals of communities to effect the change that they want to see, communities have goals about increasing community safety, and including and building belonging of young people in the community.”