KEY POINTS:
Not one person has been arrested over child sex offences as a result of the Federal Government's intervention in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.
No one has been charged, no one has gone to court and no one has been sent to jail.
But while critics of the intervention
claim this shows the emergency measures are failing, others say the focus on building trust and creating a safe environment for children remains firmly on track.
Despite the urgency of the radical and sweeping reforms - implemented after a damning report that found child sex offending in all 45 communities visited - not one offender has been brought to justice. Olga Havnen, from the National Aboriginal Alliance, says she is not surprised.
Many Aborigines from the 73 remote communities seized by the Federal Government as part of its campaign to stamp out child abuse had been scared by the manner of the intervention, launched in June, she said.
"It has been a shock and it's been heavy-handed and it hasn't created a climate of trust and respect and positive relations," Havnen said
She backs an approach that is "more constructive and less confrontational".
"Engage community people themselves about how to best identify child abuse and children at risk, and I'm talking about community health workers, teachers and women's centres who can monitor children's behaviour," she said.
"This is the best way to get people to disclose sensitive information."
But it does take time to build trust and the police officer overseeing the operation, Assistant Commissioner Grahame Kelly, said that while there had been no arrests to date, investigations were under way in a number of communities.
"(Child abuse) is not an easy crime to uncover," he said. "For starters, even if you do get to the stage where you start to get some disclosures, it's then a difficult crime to investigate and also to follow through with prosecution."
A child abuse taskforce set up by the Northern Territory Government 16 months ago is at the forefront of investigations.
It has been given a recent funding boost as part of the Northern Territory Government's response to the "Little Children are Sacred Report" - which prompted the intervention - and the Federal Government has promised six more investigators by July next year.
But Kelly pointed out that the intervention hopes to achieve more than simply apprehending offenders - it wants to stop the abuse from happening in the first place.
"The intervention is about creating an environment where children can be safe, it's about reducing the dysfunction in communities, it's about trying to get children attending school, it's about reducing the abuse of alcohol," he said.
"If people are under the impression that the intervention is just to find people who are committing child abuse offences then they are thinking about it in entirely the wrong way."
There are now seven new police stations in the desert, with a total of 18 expected to be up and running by January. "They are not a child abuse investigation unit ... but they will build rapport with the community to ferret out what is going on there," Kelly said.
Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough said this week "real improvements" were being noticed now intervention was in full swing.
"What I've heard is that alcohol is down, that there is more food on the table and there are more children going back to school," he said.
He acknowledged that some Aborigines still had concerns about the implementation of the reforms, "which is totally understandable".
It is these concerns that Havnen believes will ultimately destine the intervention to fail. "It's not good enough to say at least something is being done - what we want is the right thing; we want sustained and positive investment.
"Unfortunately, at the moment most of the money that has been committed will be consumed by bureaucracy and administration."
At best she said only 65 per cent of children in the 73 communities targeted by the intervention were undergoing health checks.
"What we haven't seen is an increase in child protection workers and children's services and programmes."
