Of 16 Indigenous female deaths in custody since 2008, 50% did not receive all appropriate care, compared to 33% of males

Half of Indigenous women who died in custody did not receive appropriate medical care

Indigenous women who died in custody were less likely to have received all the care they needed, but were more likely to have been injured in custody than Indigenous men, an analysis by Guardian Australia has found.

Deaths Inside also found Indigenous women were more likely than men to have died in circumstances where police and prisons failed to follow their own procedures.

The Human Rights Law Centre has described the treatment of Indigenous women in detention as “devastating”.

Ruth Barson, director of legal advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre, said Aboriginal women were disproportionately affected by laws such as mandatory alcohol detention, jail for fines and other mandatory sentencing schemes for lower-level offences.

Guardian Australia compiled all publicly available data on Indigenous deaths in custody for the past 10 years to create the Deaths Inside database.

Of the 16 Indigenous women and girls who died in police or prison custody since 2008, 50% did not receive all appropriate medical care, compared to 33% of Indigenous men and boys.

Females were also twice as likely to have been injured in custody – a definition which includes people who were injured in a car crash connected to a police pursuit.

Coronial findings on the deaths of Indigenous women and girls found that police or prisons had failed to follow all of their own procedures in 43.8% of cases, compared to 38.1% of cases involving males.

The same trends were seen in non-Indigenous deaths in custody. An analysis of coronial files from 2010 to 2015 found that women and girls who died in custody were twice as likely as male prisoners to have not received appropriate medical care and 50% more likely to have died in circumstances where procedures were not followed.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are the fastest growing prison population in Australia.

“It’s devastating and speaks of a system that’s really infected with discrimination right from the moment that unjust laws are passed, to the time that women are locked up, to the time that women are denied the opportunity for parole, denied the opportunity to rebuild their lives,” Barson said.

She said multiple reports dating back to the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991 had recommended law reforms such as introducing a national mandatory custody notification service, ending the practice of jailing for fines and reforming bail laws that would reduce both the number of deaths in custody and the number of Indigenous women in custody.

Barson said it would be disingenuous of governments to suggest that they are not aware of either the treatment of Indigenous women by the justice system, or the solutions.

“I don’t think we in 2018 can say that government does not know this is happening,” she said. “At best they are wilfully blind and at worst they are abrogating their responsibility to treat all people fairly and decently.”

Dr Megan Williams, a senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, said the poor quality and often dismissive nature of medical treatment in custody discouraged people from seeking further help, which contributed to higher rates of death.

“I have seen judgement or behaviour of nurses or medical staff when attending to people, by say putting on gloves in a very pointed way that conveys a message of shame, that a person is not good enough or not deserving of care,” she said.

Williams said she had seen women complaining of severe pain being given a Panadol, rather than having the cause of that pain interrogated. That is what happened with Ms Dhu, a 22-year-old Yamatji woman who died after being remanded at South Hedland police lockup for unpaid fines.

In another case, a woman who reported feeling unwell to medical staff at Greenough prison in Western Australia was believed to be dehydrated and given water, before dying of septicemia. In 2010, a woman at Townsville correctional centre in Queensland committed suicide after being denied pain medication and medical care for a severe tooth abscess.

“Governments can say: we do provide services,” she said. “But it’s the implementation and lack of care in those services that has led to grave risks and death.”

Deaths Inside also found that a significant number of Indigenous women died in protective custody or after being arrested for alcohol-related offences. They include Ms Mandijarra, who lay dead for up to four hours before police at Broome lock-up checked on her, and MTFM, who died in the driveway of the Darwin Sobering Up Shelter in 2015 after being placed in mandatory alcohol detention by police.