Seminar on Violence Against Women and Children

Te Tui, 13 Reeves Road
Auckland
2:00 pm

Rau rangatira ma, tenei te mihi ki a koutou i runga i te kaupapa o te ra – mana wahine. Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena ra tatou katoa.

Thank you Pam and Kate for the invitation and for organising this seminar. Thank you also to the speakers at this morning’s sessions and thank you to my parliamentary colleagues who have taken the time to join the discussion today.

I have been Minister of Women’s Affairs for just over a year now. I enjoy the portfolio for the opportunities it gives me to connect with women who are making a difference from one end of the country to the other.

There is much that’s positive about the portfolio and there is a lot to celebrate about the progress women have made in the 20 years since the fourth Labour Government established the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

You would expect therefore, in the many speeches I give, that there would be a positive focus on what has been achieved – and there is – but there is also a focus on what still needs to be done. That means that I have been speaking a lot in this past year about violence against women, because this issue really is the elephant in the living-room – the compelling issue that we cannot, and must not, ignore.

Nothing is more urgent or more challenging than eliminating violence within the family and other forms of violence where women are overwhelmingly the victims.

I know you have probably been deluged with depressing statistics this morning, but I want to briefly just mention two numbers that demonstrate the disproportionate impact of violence on New Zealand women and why I say domestic violence is a gender issue.

• The first is 85 per cent. According to the Police, that’s the percentage of reported family violence cases that involve women as the victims.
• The second is 94 per cent. That’s the percentage of perpetrators of adult family violence-related murders who were men in the four years to 2004.

This is not to say that women are never violent – they are. But the evidence shows women are overwhelmingly the victims, rather than the perpetrators of serious violence – and we will not put a stop to the devastating immediate and inter-generational effects of this violence unless we understand and address this reality.

Respected researchers have asked us to ignore this fact, because their research shows that men and women are equally violent. To use an insurance term, on a knock for knock basis this is true, but it is the women who feel the fear; it is the women who are hospitalised and it is the women who die. I am not for one minute justifying the violence that does occur the other way around; it is not a competition. But we have to understand the nature of a problem if we are to address it and we need to focus our attention on the causes of the violence if we are to come anywhere near eliminating it from our landscape.

Last year I sat on the New Zealand Parliamentarians Population and Development group’s Open Hearing into the Prevention of Violence against Women and Children. What shocked me about that experience was how little had changed in the ten years or so since I sat on the Select Committee that considered the Domestic Violence Act in the 1990s. The names of the victims may have changed but the stories hadn't.

This led me back to Hamilton, the home of the Abuse Intervention Pilot Project, and the beginning of my questioning of how a Pilot as successful as that had not been rolled out around New Zealand.

At the same time I met a senior police officer who had made it his business to know the names of the women who had died at the hands of intimate partners. He knew the public knew of Coral Burrows and James Whakaruru – but not the women. And what he found were patterns and what he also found were points of intervention. If only they knew what they were seeing.

I want to come back to that point because it is central to finding solutions, but first I want to talk about what the government is doing. That’s because, while government can’t fix this on its own, it does have a big role to play.

Last year the government formed a Family Violence Ministerial Team to build upon earlier initiatives that addressed family violence, most significantly Te Rito – New Zealand Family Violence Prevention Strategy.

By putting senior Ministers on the team we signalled that this was a major priority for the government. The team was extended to include Steve Chadwick who chaired the Open Hearing I referred to before. The Ministerial team was backed up by the Taskforce for Action on Violence within Families and which includes a number of chief executives of government departments, as well as members of the judiciary, the Families Commission, the Children’s Commissioner, the police and key representatives of the NGO sector. The Taskforce has provided real leadership and ensured that government agencies work closely together on integrated solutions. The Taskforce released its first programme of action in July this year. The programme has actions under four headings, and I would like to briefly cover each.

Action point one is ‘Leadership’, because the Taskforce realises how vital it is that they raise the level of public awareness of the priority that is being given to working together to end family violence and promote stable, healthy families.

Part of the work under this heading involves improving understanding of the nature of family violence and appropriate prevention strategies. This will lead to a system of mortality reviews so we learn the lessons that need to be learned.

Action point two is ‘Changing attitudes and behaviour’ and under this heading the government has provided $11.5 million over four years for the nationwide campaign to change attitudes and behaviour toward family violence. The Families Commission is also contributing to this project through allocating a $2.5 million over three years.

The campaign will initially focus on the attitudes and behaviours of men who are violent toward their partners.

Research is currently being done to understand how to change perpetrator behaviour and this will inform the key messages of the campaign.

Action point three is ‘Ensuring safety and accountability’. Under this work-stream the focus is on the justice sector and how work in this area can improve access to justice, including rolling out local case co-ordination across the country. This is the Hamilton Project finally being rolled out.

Action point four is ‘Effective support services’ and under this heading the government is investing a further $9 million in family violence prevention services, spread over four years. This will go towards community service providers such as 24 hour crisis lines, counselling, social work support, safe-house accommodation, advocacy and information. It represents a 20 per cent increase in government funding and seeks to improve the capacity and capability of the family violence service sector.

There is also work underway to review the current funding models with the aim of developing a new model that will ensure the appropriate and effective use of funds.

So that is essentially the plan. There is other work that is linked into this and I will speak briefly about the contribution of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

The Ministry has commissioned research from the University of Waikato into women’s experiences of protection orders under the Domestic Violence Act 1995.

The research will be completed by early next year and will help the Ministry inform government strategies regarding domestic violence. Having had discussions with the authors, I am anticipating that the report will provide us with some powerful reasons why systems need to be responsive to the complex issues that underpin domestic violence.

The Ministry is also undertaking a project to investigate the potential role of victim advocates, particularly in courts, to help people get information and access to the full range of support and services – something Hamilton already had.

Can I say that arising from this I hope that we achieve a commitment to an ongoing process of evaluation and review. Not just mortality reviews but – checking out if the system is working.

Which brings me back to what I believe is the central point about the struggle to eliminate violence. I think the future issues now lie with the challenge of changing hearts and minds, not just changing the law.

This doesn’t mean that government doesn’t have a critical, ongoing role – we need to continue to get the law right and ensure that government interventions are well thought out. What it means is that government can’t do it alone. We cannot legislate to change the attitudes that tolerate violence.

This means not only that government agencies are going to have to work more closely together – and we are certainly having success in ensuring that happens – but also that government will have to work more closely with communities and be prepared to respond to and support initiatives that come out of communities.

I want to quote from a report:
“The public through the submissions made to this Committee, has expressed its concern at the increase in violence and has called on it to find solutions. It is not unfair to say that the public now has the community it deserves.

For the last two or three decades permissiveness has gone unchecked; domestic violence is rampant; the ‘macho’ image has been encouraged by advertising for commercial interests to the detriment of women; aggressive behaviour and violence in ‘sport’ has become accepted; pornography has become accepted as the norm, as has violence in the visual media; racism has increased; economic inequality with its attendant stresses and frustrations has increased; illiteracy and lack of parenting skills are common and awareness of spiritual values is sadly lacking.”

This section of the report ends with the statement:

"No one can afford to be complacent about the problem. Violence occurs by acts of commission and omission and we are all responsible."

Those comments could have been written today, but they were written nearly 20 years ago and come from the Report of the Ministerial Committee on Violence – commonly referred to as the Roper Report – in 1987. That powerful piece of text falls under the heading ‘the Unpalatable Truth’; unpalatable because it tells us that we are all responsible for the kind of society we have today, and for the results, including our appalling record of violence against women and children.

Our acts of omission are about tolerating violence, which is why I welcome the White Ribbon initiative – a group of men in Canada started a movement asking men to speak out against violence against women. The white ribbon is the symbol of men's opposition to violence against women. Wearing it is a symbol of the personal pledge never to commit, condone nor remain silent about violence against women.

I would like all of next Saturday to wear our white ribbons in acknowledgement of the fact that violence occurs by acts of commission and omission and we are all responsible. And that none of us will commit, condone or remain silent about violence again.