I imagine it was the same expression seen by 74,785 Kiwi children this year. That's how many kids were there when the police were called to domestic violence situations. They get called to 200 domestic violence situations a day.
The reality is that it's not something that just happens in PNG.
That's why the White Ribbon Week is so impactful. It reminds you that domestic violence happens here.
You can't fail to be reminded when you see a 6ft dude in flannels tottering down the street in stilettos. Or when a biker, so big he could fold you up like a paper plane, roars through the town waving a white ribbon.
The campaign hits the mark on reminding you that domestic violence is a problem. Even in our sleepy mossy rock on the edge of the world.
But there's still another problem. When we talk about violence against women, we're often talking about physical violence. What we're not talking about is intimidation, isolation, domination, humiliation ... We're not talking about emotional abuse.
Physical violence is horrific. But emotional abuse is just as crippling. In fact, it is repeatedly cited by research as leaving deeper, more permanent scars than physical abuse. It's also often the warning sign that the relationship is unhealthy, and may develop into physical abuse.
While I was writing this, I was browsing through the Sophie Elliott Foundation's website on dating power and violence.
You can't do it without crying. The crucial sentence was one that said neither Sophie, nor her mum, recognised her relationship was abusive. These intelligent women couldn't see it. There's clearly a problem in recognising emotional violence.
The problem is we lack concrete concepts of emotional abuse. Physical abuse is easily defined. But not emotional abuse. Is it clinginess? Is it isolation tactics? Is it just you over-reacting?
There's no PowerPoint presentation with dinky headings. No flow diagram to follow. We don't know if certain behaviour is abusive, because we never get told what emotional abuse looks like.
That means even intelligent women, like Sophie, end up in an emotionally abusive situation. They don't recognise the need to get out. Plus, it's not helped by the fact that the person involved is in love. Their perception of their partner is as reliable as a portrait of Anne of Cleves.
This makes recognising emotionally abusive behaviour almost impossible. That's why you need an unshakeable checklist of what it is. So when they do something, and you don't know how to feel, you can cross-reference. Then you can recognise, "no, that's abusive behaviour".
That's also precisely what we don't have. There have been a efforts recently to fill the information vacuum. White Ribbon ran a month long campaign in 2012 on non-physical violence. Foundations like Sophie Elliott's are trying to educate schools on dating power and control. There are some quizzes you can do, like the one on areyouok.org.nz.
But I had to go looking for these. And if you have to look, then the message isn't ingrained deeply enough.
That's why it needs to be in the curriculum. They want to include consent classes in sex ed? Great. We need classes on emotional abuse, too. Fifteen to 24-year-olds are the demographic most at risk of physical, sexual and psychological victimisation.
We need nationwide education on the issue. It should be in the curriculum.
Anything less isn't good enough.
On Twitter Verity Johnson: @thebumbleveee
