A people at war with ourselves

By Jan Corbett, Andrew Stone and Carroll du Chateau

Morning at the Auckland District Court and the queue outside the duty solicitors' office stretches across the waiting room. Smells of damp leather, wet clothes and perspiration are overlaid with the unmistakable whiff of urine.

It's the usual Monday crowd - mostly young, male and brown, dressed in jeans, sweatshirts, beanies or back-to-front baseball caps, trying to put together some sort of excuse before appearing before the relentlessly cheerful Judge Morris.

They swagger forward, chins out-thrust, hair pulled into greasy ponytails, staunch.

Violence is big here after the weekends. Charges range from threatening to kill, grievous bodily harm, possession of a knife, fighting in public, assaulting police, assault on a female and assault with intent to injure, to assault with a blunt instrument.

One offender, whose latest assault charge comes after a 10-page list of previous convictions, is already doing periodic detention and attending two Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a week.

"It's getting to the stage where we may have to lock you up for a while to dry you out," complains Judge Morris.

Similar scenes are played out daily in courts across the nation.

In a country once renowned for a low crime-rate, where doors were never locked, children could walk alone to school and roam freely through parks and where old people could rely on neighbours for help rather than having to bar the doors and windows against them, something fundamental has changed.

Now children are chaperoned to and from school, home invasions make the news weekly, no one opens the door to a stranger, women carry cellphones when driving alone at night, teachers are attacked in class and even judges are worried about their safety on the Bench.

They have reason to be afraid.

According to figures from the British Home Office, New Zealand is now the most violent country in the developed world, leaving aside South Africa,which is racked by racial conflict.

With 1121 violent crimes per 100,000 people, we outstrip Canada at 979, Australia at 861 and, astonishingly, the United States at 610.

Countries such as France, Spain and Italy record only a quarter of the violent crimes counted in this country.

Worse, studies from both Victoria and Otago Universities have found that only a fraction of the violence in the community turns up on police files.

What the criminologists call this "dark figure" of unreported violence was also discovered by the researchers responsible for the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, which has followed the lives of 1037 men and women born in that city between April 1972 and March 1973.

Interviewed at age 21, 45 per cent of the men and 25 per cent of the women said they had been the victim of at least one physical assault in the previous year. Most were not reported to the police.

But murder, the ultimate violent crime, seldom goes unrecorded. Returning to the British Home Office figures, New Zealand, at 2.37 murder victims per 100,000 people, outranks Australia, Canada and Britain for homicide.

Largely because of easy access to guns, the US still leads the murder table with 6.8 per 100,000 - again ignoring South Africa, where the rate is off the scale.

Statisticians warn that the international comparisons are not absolute because of variations in how crimes are classified or even reported to the police. For instance, where we may record three charges from one crime, the British will record only the most serious offence.

But when New Zealand was included in an international crime survey in 1992 - a study relying on random telephone interviews - we had the highest rate of victimisation for assault and threats and the second-highest rate for assault with force. And that was before the peak in 1995 when convictions for violent crime hit 16,778, close to double the 9548 convictions for violence in 1988.

Not only is there more violence than a decade ago, but as Ministry of Justice researchers found, the type of violence is more serious than in the 1980s.

And what most concerns those in the field is that every year the culprits get younger.

The national manager of Youth Aid, Inspector Chris Graveson, says: "There is no doubt people are becoming more violent at an earlier age. I'm seeing 12-year-olds doing serious violent crime."

Paradoxically, this rise in violence is accompanied by a growing abhorrence for the types of violence society once sanctioned, such as caning in schools or smacking children at home.

Worldwide, violent crimes are committed predominantly by young men aged 15 to 29. After that age, their desire to kick and punch declines significantly, either because they have learned from their mistakes or because maturity dampens risk-taking behaviour.

In this country, violence is endemic among young Maori and Pacific Island males. Although they are only 15 per cent of the population, Maori men account for 35 per cent of the arrests for violence.

Similarly, Pacific Island men account for 10 per cent of the arrests, and they make up only 3.4 per cent of the population. On Wednesday we investigate the racial question more closely.

In 1996, Victoria University criminologist Professor Warren Young led a team looking at the victims of crime. It found that - rather than the entire country drowning in a tidal wave of violent crime - a particular segment of New Zealanders are being repeatedly victimised, accounting for 86 per cent of the violence.

These repeat victims are more likely to be women and there is "some indication" that Pacific Island people in general and Pacific Island women in particular are at greatest risk of being repeatedly victimised.

Young beneficiaries are also more likely to be victims than are superannuitants. Men are more likely to be bashed by strangers, women by people they know.

Violence is one of those unusual crimes where the shame somehow transfers to the victim. Few are willing to be interviewed about its impact on them, especially if it means being identified. The shame for victims of domestic violence is even more acute.

But in today's Weekend Life, we bring you the story of four victims who are not afraid to speak out.

On Wednesday we take you into the world of Waitakere's Senior Sergeant Dave Ryan, who tells of going to houses where frightened children jump into his arms.

"They want a cuddle to feel safe."

At week's end, we visit the North Shore, where 60 men a month go to courses meant to stop them from bashing their partners. Many, ordered to attend by the courts, have lost everything - families, jobs and friends.

Says therapist John Bailey: "To be blunt, for many of these guys it's the first time they've had to confront their lives without a beer in their hands."

Violence in relationships can profoundly affect children. Research shows that children who witness violence can become aggressive themselves, causing trouble at home and at school.

Special Education Service manager Chris Hilton-Jones says much of the upsurge of bullying and playground violence can be traced to parental blow-ups.

On Monday we examine violence in the classroom and on the playground.

In one classroom visited during this investigation, the teacher stood before his troubled charges and wrote on the whiteboard a phrase he borrowed from a judge and wanted them to remember for ever: "Violence is the rhetoric of the inarticulate."