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Creating a Safe Supportive Environment (CASSE) work began in the relentless, suffocating heat of the summer of 2012 in Central Australia.
I fell into the furnace of the molten coalface of the lives of Aboriginal people, fringe dwellers, who walk the streets at night, neither sleeping nor dreaming, with no place to be, night patrols cruising, drowning their sorrows, facing cruel condemnation in the courts, fighting to the screaming noise of the singing cicadas, their pain suppressed, and their hopes repeatedly dashed and found the word trauma deleted from my mind. Mindlessness and indigestible panic prevailed; Terra Nullius and the shameful heat of it all.
This is the ground on which we are working. Over the years, Aboriginal people have spoken to us about their “hurting hearts,” of “weakened spirits” and of the need to “wake up strong.” Monstrosity reigns with a “too much” of overwhelming annihilating stimuli and/or the gaping void of no man’s land of “too little” recognition and good relations.
Let me take you to the Bleeding heart of Aboriginal Central Australia.
Ninety-nine percent of all youth in detention in the Northern Territory are Aboriginal, male and aged from 10 to 17.
Suicide rates in NT are the highest in Australia, Aboriginal people have the highest and Australia has the highest in the world.
More than 60% of assault offenses in the NT are associated with domestic violence. Aboriginal women comprise the highest proportion of victims at 82%.
CASSE is a not-for-profit organization with a psychoanalytic orientation, dedicated to changing minds and saving lives. CASSE aims to facilitate a two-way working in intercultural spaces which implies a relational companionship and a working together in healing processes.
CASSE has developed programs such as the Shields For Living Tools For Life program taking high-risk youth from custody to country providing a dual therapeutic and cultural program; the therapeutic being found in cultural traditions. The elders teach