A model for alcohol-mediated violence in an Australian Aboriginal community

This study introduces a new model for understanding alcohol use and violence in a contemporary Australian Aboriginal community. Based on ethnographic and survey data collected in the community, which is not further identified in this manuscript, the model examines circumstantial, community- and individual-level factors surrounding alcohol use and its associated violence. Community member's beliefs about the effect of alcohol on individual behavior and emotion bring about the expectation that intoxicated individuals will remember past grievances and act upon them. Individual's actions are affected by community members' beliefs about alcohol as well as the individual's own more idiosyncratic beliefs and expectations, the disinhibiting qualities of alcohol, the individual's emotional state, and the circumstances surrounding a drinking episode. These factors interact to construct a situation in which "being drunk" encourages an individual to bring out grievances and conflicts and address them through physical confrontation. In this manner, alcohol acts as a conduit for the playing out of conflicts and tensions within the community. But this system represents a relatively ineffectual form of conflict mediation and tension reduction, thus suggesting an important critique of the classic "time out" thesis of drunken comportment. Drunken confrontations, rather than being a "time out," represent an integrated part of the way in which conflicts are played out in the community. This model provides a useful framework for future research to examine alcohol-mediated conflict in indigenous communities.