Children in Australia's aboriginal communities are six times more likely to be abused or neglected than the country's non-indigenous children, an Australian government report has found.

The report, which was expected to reveal improvements in the lives of Australia's most disadvantaged minority, highlights instead the devastating abuse suffered by Aboriginal women and children and the widening discrepancies between their lives and those of other Australians.

Two years after former Prime Minister John Howard introduced the Northern Territories Emergency Response (NTER) in an attempt to reduce the appalling levels of violence in indigenous communities, yesterday's report reveals that little has changed. The warning bell sounded in the 2007 'Little Children are Sacred' report which detailed the abuse of Aboriginal women and children and which led to the NTER - commonly known as the Intervention - appears to have been ignored.

The 'Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage' report, released every two years, has found that substantiated child abuse cases in the indigenous community more than doubled from 16 per 1000 children in 1999 - 2000 to 35 per 1000 children in 2007 - 2008. In the same period, abuse cases among non-indigenous children increased from five per 1000 to six per 1000.

The report also found that Aboriginal women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised due to domestic violence than non-indigenous women, although Aborigines make up only 2 per cent of the country's 22 million population.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described the report as "devastating" and "unacceptable." He also admitted that poor data collection could be concealing the real depth of sexual and physical abuse in indigenous communities.

But in the squalid, over-crowded town camps where the majority of Aborigines live in conditions on a par with Third World townships, its results come as no surprise.

Some of the worst violence is seen in the town camps around Alice Springs, which has earned the unwanted title of homicide capital of Australia because of the often horrific murders committed by indigenous men in the surrounding Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) lands. According to the latest statistics, between May 2007 and November 2008 alone, women here were killed at the rate of one every three months.

Young girls are also routinely raped, often by packs of men, amidst an entrenched culture of silence and a complex honour system which places more importance on the status of indigenous men than on the lives of women and girls.

Interviews carried out by The Times with Aboriginal women and the people struggling to protect them revealed a brutality that most in the non-indigenous community find impossible to comprehend.

All the women spoken to by The Times bore jagged scars, most had broken bones and many did not understand the concept of rape - violent sex being the norm in their lives rather than an aberration.

Shicana, an Aboriginal woman in her early 30s whom The Times met at a bus stop as she fled her husband, was covered in machete wounds to her arms, legs and skull. She suffers slight brain damage from multiple beatings to her head. Her face was horribly scarred from the boiling water her husband recently threw over her after dragging her up to the hills to be raped and tortured for days.

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