KEY POINTS:
Vic Tamati caught up recently with a mate he hadn't seen for 30 years.
Tamati is a survivor. He has come out of a violent culture and has learnt to control his violence.
But his mate, who works for the Corrections Department, has kept track of their other friends from the early 1970s when they grew up together in what were then the poorer inner suburbs of Auckland.
"He was in jail, he was in jail, he was in jail," his mate told him, reeling off a list of almost-forgotten names.
"A lot of the others we grew up with have died way before their time - fighting, in car crashes, overdosing, sniffing petrol, suicide, accidents, none of them normal," Tamati says.
"If they are not dead they are nut bars, and if they are not nut bars they are in jail or they are living on the streets."
Television viewers will get a glimpse of Tamati's personal story in an advertisement that starts tomorrow, one of a series in the Government's four-year, $14 million "It's not OK" campaign which aims to make family violence as unacceptable as drink-driving or smoking.
But the way he behaved to his wife and children was not unique. It was behaviour he learned from the environment where he grew up in the 1960s and 1970s.
A generation later, his story still reverberates in the street gangs that rule the poorer parts of our cities and in the way many men still behave at home. A 2004 study found that 33 to 39 per cent of Kiwi women who had partners had been physically or sexually assaulted - 19 to 23 per cent of them severely.
Tamati, now 53, was born five years after his parents arrived in Auckland from Samoa around 1950. His dad worked in a factory; mum worked in a towel laundry. Vic and his five siblings were looked after by a grandmother who spoke only Samoan.
When other families came to visit, a common entertainment was to get everyone from both families in a circle and call out the names of one child from each family in turn to fight a child from the other family.
"It didn't matter if you were different ages or heights or weights," says Tamati.
School was no better. Tamati remembers asking in Samoan if he could go to the toilet, and the Palagi teacher yelling at him and then whacking Tamati's fingers on his desk. Not understanding English, he thought he was being punished for dirty fingernails.
On his first day in high school, he found that his mother had bought him the uniform of another school.
"Right away I think I'm different," he says. "When they said, 'School stand,' I sat down, and when they said, 'School sit,' I stood up. Because I was so different, I decided to rock the boat from there."
During his school years, the family moved to Mangere, where the gangs collected youths from whole suburbs. Tamati joined the Mangere Boys, who defended their patch against the Otahuhu Rebels and South Dogs.
In 1971, inspired by America's Black Panthers, a Polynesian Panthers was formed in Auckland. Tamati, then still at Aorere College, became head of the Panthers' South Auckland chapter.
"We would follow the police because not only were they arresting kids, but they were not telling them what their rights were. So we formed a PIG Patrol - Police Investigation Group - to monitor the police with a camera.
"We also had a TAB - Tenants Aid Brigade. People were getting a raw deal with their homes. At that time, they were trying to push them out. We would go down, all these young kids, and surround the homes. The landlord would send in these men with baseball bats and steel bars to kick the people out. We ended up having some battles with the landlords' thugs."
He compares dawn raids against Pacific overstayers with anti-apartheid riots in the black South African township of Soweto around the same time. "I remember Tongan guys being led out all handcuffed at dawn. They lived across the road from where Dad and I were working," he says.
Eventually expelled from Aorere, Tamati and a mate hit the road around New Zealand. In Christchurch, he got night shift jobs in factories, met his wife Losa and had three children by the time he started a carpentry apprenticeship at 21.
His apprentice wage of $77 a week was painfully inadequate.
"I'd go to work on a building site and come home and there would be nothing to eat. I'd be yelling and screaming at Losa: 'What do you mean, I gave you $50.'
"But I'd go drinking. The guys at work would buy the alcohol, or I'd put it up on tick and come home drunk. On two different occasions I came home hungry, drunk, no food, nothing to eat and just lost the plot."
Once he threw a chair at Losa, another time a milk bottle.
Both times she ducked out of danger. But when she ended up with two black eyes, she walked out with the children. A woman on the bus befriended her and introduced her to a church and, eventually, she went back to Tamati.
"I was just trying to make ends meet and it wasn't working. I used to yell and scream and throw tantrums and fits," Tamati says.
"Losa would say to me, 'The neighbours, the neighbours.' I would just walk outside and say, 'F*** the neighbours'."
Once he knocked out a neighbour who was revving his motorbike too loudly.
Out driving with the family, a man passed him and gave him the fingers. He slammed down the accelerator and chased the man with Losa screaming beside him and the kids crying in the back. He slowed down enough to push Losa out of the car, then resumed the chase.
"It was like, far out, because all I saw was red, like it had a filter there and nothing else was there but that red."
But by that time he had started to realise that he needed to change. Since 1985, he had a new job as a youth worker for the Christchurch City Mission. In about 1992, when he left his youngest daughter bruised all over her body after a "hiding" when she was only 7 or 8, he finally went to an anger management course.
"I got ordered to go after bashing Bonnie up. It was like, 'Go or it's all over'," he says.
At the same time, Losa did a drug and alcohol course as the child of an alcoholic father.
Between the two courses, they picked up tools to handle his anger. One was a "20/20" rule, giving each person 20 uninterrupted minutes to say how they felt. Another was replacing "you" statements about a partner or child with "I" statements such as "I'm angry because ... "
"The best one for me was time out - not to stay there and take control, but to have time out with a specific time around it and a specific place where you would go," he says.
He would go out to a nearby park for about an hour.
It wasn't easy. His mates laughed at him. "It was like, 'Who wears the pants in your family? Losa's got you by the short and curlies'."
Sixteen years after finally giving up violence, he still feels the damage. An adult daughter still subconsciously ducks when he calls her because of the way he shook her as an infant. But his six children and two adopted children, who have now given him seven grandchildren, have all forsworn violence. They use the "naughty step" for time out instead.
Tamati has gone on to youth work as a volunteer in Africa, then for Internal Affairs in Christchurch, for a Pacific Island network in Brisbane and now back in Auckland as an advocate for child victims of domestic violence through the Pacific Islands Safety and Prevention Project in Massey, where Losa also works. Their children now trust him to look after their own children.
"I have broken the curse of family violence/domestic violence," he says.
It is not simply that he is older. "If that were the case, then how come all my mates are in jail for violent crimes?"
From where Tamati stands, poverty and racism have not gone away. And nor, outside his own family, has family violence.
"I think there is more and it's worse, because of the numbers that are now being bashed to death, the age of the parents and the age of the kids that are being killed," he says.
"I know that, in my circle of friends, it's been there among all of us and it's still there. People were just saying to me at the weekend at the Polynesian Festival, 'So-and-So just bashed up his wife.'
"They are ringing me up to make appointments, but I don't need this. Call the 0800 number."
www.areyouok.org.nz
Phone 0800 456 450.
BRO POWER
Bro'town-style cultural performances are one way to help young people escape from a culture of violence, Vic Tamati says.
The former Christchurch youth worker and his wife Losa helped launch the careers of many of the people behind the popular TV comedy, including the comedy group the Naked Samoans - Oscar Kightley, Mario Gaoa, Shimpal Lelisi and David Fane.
They set up a youth centre called YCD (Youth and Cultural Development) which ran a homework centre, after-school and holiday programmes.
The young people put on a performance at the end of every holiday programme, charged their parents and the public to attend, and put the proceeds into what became "full-on productions".
Kightley was a tutor on the holiday programme and helped spawn a production house, Pacific Underground, which still operates today.
"Oscar came up with the name, Losa put together the constitution and I just became the chairman of both Pacific Underground and YCD," Tamati says.
The Tamatis' nephew Malo Luafutu (Scribe) got his start in Pacific Underground, and their own daughter Karoline (Ladi6) has become a leading singer of soul and hip-hop.
Tamati says none of the young people he has worked with have adopted the "gang rap" hip-hop genre with its lyrics of violence.
"If anything, their message is that they sing and rap about peace," he says.
