F E AT U R E
Violent nights ‘Tis the season of goodwill, but not for everyone. LAURA PITCHER looks beyond this season’s predicted annual surge of family violence and asks what has changed since New Zealand’s 1995 landmark legislation against domestic violence.
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hristmas time can bring some of our worst rates of ‘intimate partner violence’. And the rates of violence don’t tumble once the tinsel comes down. Despite feminism’s gains over the past 50 years, violence between partners is on the increase, and the associated issues are getting more complex. During the past financial year police responded to more than 118,000 call-outs. This was up 8,000 on the previous year, which was up 6,000 on the year before, said Ang Jury, Chief Executive of Women’s Refuge. Women’s Refuge also received 50,645 crisis phone calls and had 26,699 women and children using their services. There are six refuges in the greater Wellington region. With women’s rights improving in almost every other area since they gained the right to vote, that violence against women is increasing is puzzling. Jury says it is extremely difficult to know if it’s an increase in occurrence or an increase in the willingness to report. ‘It’s also the sort of increase you can expect to see with population growth,’ she says. The terminology pertaining to these issues has also changed, the term ‘domestic violence’ being displaced by ‘intimate partner violence’ in the field. ‘The problem hasn’t grown a lot over the past 30 years, but it hasn’t decreased at all either.’ Jury talks to me with a tiredness that comes from years of dealing with the brunt of such violence, without the resources or answers to make headway on its source.
She says the increasing complexity of cases over the past four years is a worrying trend. Formerly, when women came to the refuge, life would be okay for them in the future if they could ensure their safety, Jury says. ‘Now what we are seeing are women with really serious mental health concerns, substance abuse issues, outstanding court issues and credit histories almost beyond repair.’ Jury thinks inequality in New Zealand and our housing problems have a lot to do with it, and the causes of intimate partner violence are likely to be similar to many other current cultural ills. And with complexity comes new challenges. The world is no longer ‘such a forgiving place’, she says. With credit and mental health histories following them, women are finding it more and more difficult to right their lives. New Zealand has previously had the unenviable distinction of being among the worst in the developed world for intimate partner violence. A study in 2011 by the New Zealand Family Violence Clearinghouse found that in New Zealand around 33% of women experience some form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Janet Fanslow, the co-director of the New Zealand Clearinghouse says this puts New Zealand about middle of the world wide range. Our Pacific neighbours, for example, are sitting at about around 78%. But she says our rates are quite high compared with the rest of the OECD. These numbers seem to be out of tune with New Zealand’s feminist history. Fanslow said
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