hearing loss and the criminal justice system - Australian Indigenous ...

Senate Inquiry March 2010_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________don’t like about what they say and how they behave. This ignorance can result in thestereotype of the ‘rude, disinterested and racist white‐fella’. This process of mutual,unclarified misunderstanding often generates real ongoing and entrenched antagonism.Therefore, what begins as culturally based misunderstanding, ends in embedded mutualantagonism that appears, to all parties, like racism.Lastly, this submission argues that the schooling of many Indigenous students operates as a‘preschool’ for prison. It does so by failing to meet the educational needs of those studentsand by being complicit in the development and embedding of patterns of persistentantisocial behaviour. This comes about, firstly, when schools ignore the evidence base inregard to how schools can best support their Indigenous students and, secondly, by failingto address the impact of widespread mild to moderate levels of hearing loss suffered by theIndigenous students. It has been shown that hearing loss, in this group, is associated withbehaviour problems at school.If schools were to heed the research, and implement the types of changes proposed, theyhave the opportunity to produce better educational outcomes for Indigenous kids and avoidestablishing patterns of the types of antisocial behaviour that set children up for laterinvolvement in the criminal justice system. This is especially true for Indigenous studentswith hearing loss._________________________________________________________________________________________________________________2 Phoenix Consulting