Australia investigates Aborigine sex slave report

SYDNEY, June 22 (Reuters) The Australian government today called for an investigation into indigenous abuse after media reports that Aboriginal men in an outback town were keeping girls as sex slaves and trading sex for petrol to be sniffed.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough said the latest report of aboriginal sexual abuse, at Mutijulu near one of Australia's major tourist attraction Uluru, was not an isolated case.

''I believe we need to have a national investigative unit that can actually look at these crimes ... right across these remote communities,'' Brough told Australian radio.

Australian Broadcasting Corp television reported late yesterday that aboriginal men in Mutijulu in the Northern Territory were keeping girls as young as five as sex slaves.

''There are predatory men in the central deserts who are systematically abusing young children,'' an unidentified witness told the ''Lateline'' news programme.

''I've been told by a number of people of men in the region who go to other communities and get young girls and bring them back to their community and keep them there as sex slaves and exchange sex for petrol with those young petrol sniffers.'' A culture of violence fuelled by alcohol and drugs has led to endemic sexual abuse against aboriginal women in remote parts of Australia, where girls as young as seven months are raped, a senior prosecutor said last month.

''We are at war inside ourselves,'' Mutijulu elder Mantatjara Wilson told Australian television. ''We live in a war zone. We suffer rapes, kidnaps, murders, arson, the torching of houses.'' Wilson told the programme that men sold petrol to children to get them hooked on petrol sniffing and then exchanged petrol for sex.

''On our lands, the police see this problem all around them, but they cannot catch the perpetrators. All Anangu people know what is going on, but everybody is too scared to speak out and report them to the police,'' Wilson said through a translator.

Brough said a lack of police in remote aboriginal communities had allowed abuse to go unchecked. There are no police stationed in Mutijulu.

''If people are fearful ... if there are no police there, if the criminal justice system doesn't work for them, those are the things I have to address,'' Brough said.

Australia's 458,500 Aborigines, around 2.3 per cent of the population, are dying at almost three times the rate of other Australians and have a life expectancy 17 years lower than the rest of the population.

In central Australia, homicide is the leading cause of premature death for aboriginal women, who are also 45 times more likely to suffer domestic violence than white women.

The Australian government has called for a return to paternalism to help Aborigines overcome appalling health and problems with alcohol, violence and sexual abuse.

REUTERS MQA ND0948