One woman's plight mobilises whole whanau

Sixty members of a Rotorua extended family are working together to eliminate family violence, thanks to one young woman who sought help from an iwi agency.

Te Akatea Iwi Tauawhi Trust, a voluntary agency run from a tiny office on historic Ohinemutu Marae, helped the woman to understand how violence had been passed down in her family through lopsided relationships generation after generation.

She went back and discussed what she had learned with her mother, her son, her sisters and then other family members.

"They were curious about what she was doing and the interest grew from there," says Grace Dorset, a grandmother of seven who started the agency and gets a progress report from the woman every week.

"Now there are 60 members of the whanau involved in moving their whanau forward. That's 60 members voluntarily working together who understand how important their behaviour is in shaping the next generation - in other words, stopping the behaviours that have had a huge impact on the family members. It's all about moving away from that [violence] and ensuring that the youngest members of their generations are kept safe."

Family violence is not something that can be "cured" overnight. Women's Refuge chief executive Heather Henare says some believe it takes four generations to break totally free of the causes of violence.

Mrs Dorset says physical violence is just the extreme end of a spectrum of domestic violence that starts with verbal insults and humiliation and grows into mental and emotional control.

A 46-year-old woman in Rotorua's Fordlands, where Once Were Warriors author Alan Duff grew up, took her five children into refuges many times during a nine-year marriage that ended only when her husband died in a car crash.

"No matter how many times I went into the women's refuge, I couldn't get away from him. He would find me. Even though I used to get beaten up, it was the emotional abuse more than the physical abuse. Everything had to revolve around him."

She understood how it happened.

"He was adopted out when he was 5. The parents whanau'ed him out, he was brought up with family. His adoptive father died when he was 13. His mother died. She gave him up. He had two other brothers after that. That's what made him so angry - why didn't his mother keep him and have two more brothers after that?"

Another woman, who was 18 months old when her father killed her mother, says teenagers join violent gangs because they grow up feeling unwanted. The gangs provide a sense of belonging - but in a culture where status depends on controlling others.

"It would kill their pride if anyone thought they didn't have that control."

Another who grew up in Fordlands and has returned says when she moved to Coromandel as a youngster she found it hard to respect men who did not beat their partners.

"I was surprised at husbands who didn't slap their wives because they dared to raise their voices or disagree with something their husband said. To me it was like, he's a wimp. If Mum even looked like she would disagree with something Dad said, she would get the bash."

Liz Olsen of the Rotorua Violence Prevention Service says 96 to 98 per cent of men who abuse their partners were abused themselves as children. She helps men to understand how they became abusive by drawing up "genograms" of violence in the generations that came before them.

Mrs Dorset uses the same technique. She asks clients to think about their parents, their parents' parents and so on as far back as they can go, listing if each relationship was or was not characterised by love, kindness, caring, sharing, trust, truth, honesty, respect, faithfulness and communication.

When it comes to applying the same tests to their own relationships, she is amazed how little many people know about their partners.

"Many are in situations where they haven't really known each other long enough to form a lasting, quality relationship." She teaches them to communicate - to listen and to hear.