Equality and Exclusion : Violence against Indigenous Women and the Development of Public Policy Responses in Australia

Over the last decades significant public resources have been directed at preventing and responding to violence against women. These responses appear to have limited impact in benefiting Indigenous women, who are perhaps the most economically, socially and politically marginalised group in Australian society. This paper analyses the way public policy has tended to ignore both the specific circumstances of Indigenous women and the types of solutions they propose to the problem of interpersonal violence. A major theme underpinning this paper is the tension, indeed at times contradiction, between exclusion and universalism manifested in the way the law and legal policy operate in relation to specific populations