Sue Foley: When will New Zealand learn to communicate properly?

Assistant Police Commissioner Sam Hoyle was asked about crime trends, and his reply was as enlightening as it was frustrating. Photo / Duncan Brown

OPINION

It’s all in a word. Or more to the point a word that seemed to be missing from all the recent commentaries around the recent International Women’s Day.

Yes, in many ways we have come a long way since the early 80s when the racing editor of the Dominion newspaper tried to get me banned from the Press Box of the Awapuni Racecourse purely because I was a female.

Females weren’t allowed in the Members Stand at that time and so the fact I had been even able to enter the building was one thing. But to step into the hallowed world of what was then very much a male-only world of racing journalists was just a step too far for some.

I will be eternally grateful to the late Alan Bright who was the Chair of Racing Journalists at the time who made me incredibly welcome and rightfully closed down any attempts to have me removed.

Back to the missing word that never got mentioned. That one word was violence. This is where there seems to have been no progress at all. In particular violence against women and children.

Illustration / Rod Emmerson

What is worse is everyone seems to have become almost immune to the issue as was evident from an interview last week with Auckland-based Assistant Police Commissioner Sam Hoyle.

He was asked about crime trends in Auckland with the interviewer clearly fixated on ram raids. The police boss replied how ram raid numbers were actually trending down but what was of concern to him was the increase in family harm incidents.

I waited for the follow-up question to find out more. The interviewer however went back to him with some inane question about ram raids and the fact that an increasing number of women and children were under attack was quickly brushed over.

I am not too sure who the genius was who replaced the word violence with the word harm but, to me, it needs to be called out for what it is with no niceties around the subject. I genuinely believe the average person has no idea what our front-line workers; be it police, health professionals, and co have to deal with day-in and day-out.

It’s a subject I can talk about firsthand.

I left school to become a medical photographer, I joked at the time that I was so desperate to get out of school that taking photos of bodies was preferable to another day in a classroom. I was 17 I can’t imagine it would be allowed now but I thought I was tough and could handle anything.

I was off a farm you see life and death on a daily basis but nothing prepared me for what I saw in that hospital. It wasn’t London, LA or even Auckland; it was regional Palmerston North.

As one of only two medical photographers in the hospital with my boss and I, there was nothing I wasn’t asked to photograph to provide records at the time. That included children who had been beaten up.

I will never forget the child whose mother had poured a jug of boiling hot water over him.

Sue Foley.

As it was unusual to have a female photographer, there was the odd occasion when the police asked me to photograph rape victims. I recall one teenage girl who was pregnant at the time, I was only a year older than the victim. I can still picture her injuries and I can still see the torment in her face.

The alleged offenders all walked free. If she was single and pregnant, the argument went, no one would believe it wasn’t consensual.

So back to the question of whether women have reason to celebrate. What should we be talking about on International Women’s Day?

New Zealanders achieved what many, including myself, thought near impossible in getting smoking banned from public places. People from all walks of life, while they still had a choice, clearly understood the health risks of just a single cigarette.

People no longer joke about drink-driving, it’s no longer socially acceptable.

So why haven’t we been able to achieve the same results with family violence?

There are many people individually doing an incredible job at breaking the cycle in pockets of the country but when are we going to take on a major public nationwide campaign that once and for all makes punching someone as shameful as smoking in a public bar?

Let’s start talking New Zealand, let’s start communicating with our voice instead of our fists. Then I will have cause to celebrate every day not just one day of the year.

- Sue Foley is a former director of corporate affairs with Westpac NZ and GM Corporate Affairs at TollNZ.