Attitudes change towards old taboo

Preventing Violence in the Home advocates Zaif Khan (left) and Jill Proudfoot. Picture / Greg Bowker

When her 2-year-old daughter started slamming doors and kicking the walls, Susan finally decided she had to do something about her husband's behaviour.

Things had deteriorated gradually during their 13-year relationship.

"I always knew he had a temper," she says. But at first, it was just irritating.

"Everything was my fault, nothing was ever his fault. If he couldn't find his car keys, it would be, 'What have you done with them?' It would be door-slamming and kicking and throwing things."

It became worse when the two children came. Susan (not her real name) had to eat with them in a bedroom because he would complain if they made a noise while he was watching the news.

If she planned to go out with friends, he would come home late so she couldn't leave the children.

"He couldn't handle the attention I was giving them," Susan says. "He wanted all the attention himself."

He began to criticise her. She was fat. She was not parenting properly.

They lived in Susan's house and she worked fulltime to pay the mortgage.

Last year he had long periods at home between jobs. He still expected her to do most of the housework.

Finally, without consulting her, he gave up his job to look after his sick father. His anger intensified.

"I guess it got to a stage where the children were being affected, in that my daughter was doing the same sorts of things - kicking, hitting, slamming doors, breaking things, kicking walls," Susan says.

She finally asked her husband to go and live with his father. He was angry, but he went. He looked after their preschool son at his place while Susan went to work. She changed the locks at home.

One night he came round at the children's bedtime, saying he wanted to say goodnight to them. He kicked in the back door and left only when Susan called the police.

They could not arrest him because he had not harmed anyone, but they alerted Preventing Violence in the Home, which helps women subjected to family violence. Its advocate brought a checklist to see whether the relationship was abusive, and Susan ticked all but two items.

"I was trying to juggle work and family commitments and trying to come to terms with these sorts of issues that I thought never happened to a white middle-class family," she says.

Unfortunately, Susan's experience is all too common. Surveys show that 19 per cent of women and 10 per cent of men have had partners who have "destroyed, damaged or harmed" things in a frightening way.

Twenty-one per cent of women and 14 per cent of men have been "hit, kicked, pushed, grabbed or shoved".

Out of 61 murders last year, 29 involved family violence.

Unlike some other antisocial behaviour, everyone regrets such violence - even the perpetrators.

"I don't think any guy [abuses] his partner or children and doesn't feel some degree of regret, shame or remorse," says Mal Lange, who counsels violent men at Henderson's Man Alive.

But abuse happens because many people want to control what their partners and children do, in the false belief that this is "love".

For two months since the deaths of twins Chris and Cru Kahui, New Zealand has been in one of its periodic states of heightened awareness of the problem.

Three weeks ago, a taskforce led by Social Development Ministry head Peter Hughes came up with a long list of proposals to do something about it.

And when Preventing Violence in the Home launched a campaign last week to get Aucklanders to donate goods to the city's biggest-ever garage sale in November, spokeswoman Trish Sherson said: "The country is at a tipping point. We have known that this problem has been getting worse for some time. Now we are looking for solutions."

"Solutions" of two kinds are needed: first, to protect women and children from violence; and second, to stop the violence in the first place.

Preventing Violence in the Home (PVH) and agencies like it already do much to protect the victims. PVH gets 90 to 100 referrals from police every week in Auckland City alone and now holds files on 13,857 people in the city's 145,100 homes.

PVH advocates such as Jill Proudfoot and Zaif Khan aim to contact victims within an hour of each police visit.

If children are present, they like to make three or four visits until the woman and children are all safe - and hope to be able to do so if the big garage sale reaches its $500,000 target.

The Hughes taskforce proposes:

* Local co-operation between police, Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS) and victim support groups such as PVH, with law changes to allow them to share information about individual families.

* Funding counselling for couples and families with violence issues, not just the existing separate programmes for perpetrators and victims.

* Dedicated family violence courts, with court advocates to help victims through processes such as getting protection orders.

* Higher income thresholds for legal aid, which will allow about 40 per cent of adults to get legal aid for protection orders compared with about 25 per cent at present.

* More prosecutions when protection orders are breached.

PVH director Jane Drumm says local co-operation should go even further. She is just back from Wales, where fortnightly meetings swap information about families not only among police, CYFS and victim groups, but also midwives, probation officers, schools and preschools, housing agencies, and the equivalent of Plunket nurses and Work and Income.

Action plans for each family are agreed and implemented. Police will prosecute breaches of protection orders, probation officers will return men to jail if they breach an order on parole, and the housing agency will change locks or move a woman to a new home.

The scheme has cut revictimisation for the women involved to 58 per cent - in Drumm's words, "a dramatic impact".

To go beyond that and eliminate the violence, often where couples choose to stay together, requires not just protection, but changing attitudes.

Again, the Hughes taskforce has plans - an ambitious advertising campaign "to transform our society into one that does not tolerate family violence". Ministries have earmarked $14 million for it over the next four years.

"We have changed attitudes to smoking, seatbelts and drink-driving," says Social Development spokesperson Stephanie Edmond.

"It's getting members of the public to think differently about it, as well as having sanctions for the behaviour."

Auckland research firm Gravitas has been interviewing 45 perpetrators of violence and people who know them to pin-point what would motivate them to change or induce the people around them to intervene.

Edmond speculates that they may find that the key motivator, as for Susan, may be realising that the violence is affecting their children.

Already the Health Ministry has funded some public education, such as a Family Planning Association pamphlet for high schools which explains what love is (such as having "freedom to do your own thing") and isn't (such as getting "angry or jealous" when your partner talks to someone else).

Agencies such as PVH and Man Alive get funding from the Family Court, CYFS and charities to run groups for violent men. Lange says two out of every five drop out early on, but if they get through the first two or three weekly sessions they usually complete the 20-week course.

He says a man who is violent to his wife and children feels ashamed and is glad to learn techniques to avoid it. This makes visible differences in their body language.

Relationship Services, which works with many couples wanting to stay together, says more than half its clients are dealing with family violence or abuse, but there is no funding under the Domestic Violence Act to work with couples together.

"It's time we stopped seeing domestic violence as a punch. Domestic violence is also the intimidation, isolation, put-downs, undermining and psychological abuse that goes on," says its practice manager, Jo-Ann Vivian.

"We see the couples and families where the family violence is just beginning, and unless they learn the skills, it's going to keep on going.

"We want to be in there doing the preventative and educative work."

In the longer term, Edmond and Lange both believe we need to change the way we bring up boys.

"Men don't show their feelings. They think they have to be strong, the boss. Not all cultures are like that," says Edmond.

Lange says a 3-year-old girl who grazes her knee will have everyone fussing over her. A 3-year-old boy will be told: "It's only a bit of blood. Stop acting like a girl."

"Right from that age, we are raising boys to be emotionally repressed and ignore their vulnerability," he says.

At Man Alive, he teaches men to express their feelings of anger, hurt, frustration, embarrassment or worry, rather than bottling them up until they break out in violence. And he sees this happening in society.

"I think men are going through a cultural shift. They are beginning to claim their manhood, to redefine it.

"Women did that in the sixties. Men are about 40 years behind, but we are getting there."

* To donate to PVH's garage sale, phone (09) 270-2545