Vickie Roach
Aboriginal Australian activist
Vickie Lee Roach (born 1958) is an Aboriginal Australian activist. She is a Yuin woman. She was the plaintiff in the landmark Australian High Court case Roach v Electoral Commissioner. At the time of the case, she was serving a six-year term in prison. Since her release, she has become an advocate for prison abolition.
Early life and criminal convictions
Vickie Lee Roach was born in 1958 in Merewether, New South Wales. She is a member of the Yuin people, an Aboriginal group whose Country is located on the South Coast of New South Wales. In 1961, at the age of two, she was charged with neglect, removed from her mother's care and placed with a non-Indigenous foster family.
Roach left the foster system at 13, following which she had numerous criminal convictions. She had 125 convictions or guilty verdicts recorded against her from 1976 to 2003, "[n]inety-nine percent" of which she classifies as "crimes of survival or disobedience".
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This entry incorporates text from “Vickie Roach” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.