Group to focus on forgotten victims of family violence

By CATHERINE MASTERS

A man beats up his wife, wrenches their 18-day-old baby out of her arms, gets in the car and drives away.

When she reports the incident to the police the newborn becomes a victim of what Domestic Violence Centre advocate Janet Lake calls the "disappearing child."

When the baby appears on the police form, given to Janet Lake so she can ensure the bashed woman gets the support she needs, it has become a tiny tick in a tiny box designated children aged 0 to 5.

No further information is recorded and no one is assigned the job of ensuring the child's rights are respected - rights sometimes as basic, as in this case, as getting fed because the mother was still breast-feeding, she says.

"The fact is, children have a right not to be thrown into cars and driven away when they have no ability to be fed when they are 18 days old."

In this case the child was collected by the police but often there is no record of what happened to children who may have witnessed the violence, or been a target of it.

"There needs to be a huge amount of advocacy so that people watchdog what happens to those children, people start tracking, people start thinking about that child in terms, if you like, of child rights."

Janet Lake hopes a new, child-focused interagency group being set up by the centre will help to fill the gaps where children are overlooked when mum is bashed.

It will work along similar lines to another interagency forum at the centre, called Saftinet, which helps to set up policies and practices to promote the safety of adult victims and hold abusers accountable.

Gaps in services are identified and strategies to make improvements are negotiated at meetings which include representatives of agencies such as courts, police, probation, women's refuge, lawyers and stopping-violence programmes.

Janet Lake said children needed the focus because adult violence was a predicator of child abuse.

United States research of 6000 families where domestic violence was present showed that in 70 per cent of cases children were also being beaten.

Dame Silvia Cartwright, soon to be Governor-General, is patron of the centre and, at a meeting this week to set up the group, said she supported the child focus.

In the more than 30 years since she began working in law much had stayed the same, she said. The terrible physical, psychological and emotional injuries suffered by women and children remained.

The incidence of violence against pregnant women and women holding their babies and of young children trying to intervene and protect their mothers still remained. So did the public's shock when a parent or partner severely injured, sexually assaulted or killed a child.

But at least New Zealand was trying to reduce family violence and now recognised that children in the care of violent adults were seriously harmed by family violence, even if they were not the physical victims.

" ... sheltering behind every battered mother there are children as seriously, if not more seriously, affected as her. And these children are likely to be more numerous than the adult victims."

Herald Online feature: violence at home

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