Chester Borrows: Society needs to stop abuse

FAMILY VIOLENCE: We need to stop the cycle.PHOTO/FILE

I REMEMBER a woman calling on me at the police station years ago after a friend had told her she needed to come.

I had no knowledge of her and wasn't expecting the visit.

She was a rural mum who got it in the neck for everything that went wrong on the farm, and when the husband was in a bad mood with stock, she got a hiding.

Raped at least weekly, she grew to expect it.

I told her life didn't need to be like that, and asked why she didn't leave her husband.

"Oh, I'd never leave him. He loves me ... he only does this because he loves me," was her reply.

I left her with a few facts to chew on, such as the message she was giving her daughters by just accepting this treatment as her lot in life.

They would likely pick a man just like dad.

The woman walked into my office two weeks later with a smile on her face. She had left him - and she has sent me a card on the anniversary of her escape from that marriage almost every year since.

There is nothing as sad as a person, usually a woman or child, who believes it is their role in life to be beaten.

We even see women who are beaten and believe this violence is an expression of love from the abusive partner.

They are frequently a child of abusive parents where the young girl grew up seeing her mum beaten by her dad.

They were the only parents she had, so for her - in spite of all the evidence to the contrary - this was situation normal.

Despite crime in New Zealand falling to its lowest rate since 1978, our rates of family violence are appallingly high. Last year alone, 100,000 incidents were reported to police - around one every five minutes.

I have attended countless family violence incidents and the story was always the same.

On the night we made it stop, but come the court hearing she would not give evidence - he had turned on the chocolates and flowers, said he was sorry over and over and had been the man she wished he was all the time.

He knew the appointment with the judge wasn't far away and he needed her on side.

Once court was over and the charges dropped for want of evidence, the cycle of abuse started again and the wheel of fortune worked its way around inevitably to the next beating.

The Government is strengthening family violence laws to enhance the current initiatives.

A new law against strangulation will act as a red flag because many abusers strangle victims during domestic assaults and choking has been shown as a precursor to domestic homicide.

We are doing what we can as a government, but we need society as a whole to step up.

We can't live people's lives for them, but we can emphatically state what is acceptable and what is not.

If we, as a civilised society, don't set the benchmark, who will?

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to keep a child safe.

Family violence is not "just another domestic", it is a crime and we cannot afford to turn a blind eye.

+Chester Borrows is the MP for Whanganui.