On December 11, journalist Katie Bradford on TV1 News reported that between 2009 and 2015, 92 women and 52 children died of abuse in New Zealand, while in 2017 there were 121,747 family harm investigations.
Those are gut-wrenching statistics.
However, on the same programme, Jan Logie the parliamentary under-secretary to the Minister of Justice for domestic and sexual violence issues, in a laudable speech launching a new anti-violence campaign on International Women's Day, declared: "We are not born with this violence."
But it seems that until we accept that the propensity for violence is part of our genetic makeup — and it is probably what has allowed us to succeed thus far as a species — we are not going to make progress on this issue.
The New Zealand Herald reported in May 2017 that "on average 13 women and 10 men are killed each year as a result of family violence". How can this occur?
Chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall was not believed when, in the 1970s, she first reported a naturally occurring war between two groups of chimpanzees.
Dubbed the Gombe Chimpanzee War, it lasted between 1974 and 1978 and involved two communities of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.
Until then, Goodall had seen the species as "rather nicer" than humans.
She was appalled when she observed the violence that erupted over territory and access to female sexual partners, and a "cannibalistic infanticide" incident in 1975 convinced her that there was a "dark side' to chimpanzees' nature which was later confirmed by studies which showed chimpanzee societies, in their natural state, wage war.
Reflecting on the warrior gene within - artwork by Christodoulos Moisa
In 2014, the Journal of Molecular Psychiatry reported scientists from the Karolinka Institute in Sweden had discovered that murderers carried a gene that made them more likely to commit violent acts.
The mutant gene, known as MAOH and CDH143 — later dubbed the warrior gene — was identified in 895 violent Finnish criminals. Interestingly, those genes were not carried by petty criminals.
Last May, the BBC reported that a defence lawyer in Tennessee had managed to get a murder charge reduced to voluntary manslaughter, saving his client from the death sentence, by using a genetic and neuroscience defence.
About 30 per cent of men have this so-called warrior gene, but whether the gene is triggered or not depends crucially on what happens to you in childhood.
Jim Fallon, a respected professor of psychiatry at the University of California, who has a large number of murderers in his family tree, discovered he had an awful lot of genes linked to violent psychopathic behaviour. He says he was protected from those genes expressing themselves by a happy childhood.
"If you've the high-risk form of the gene and you were abused early on in life, your chances of a life of crime are much higher; if you have the high-risk gene but you weren't abused, then there really wasn't much risk," he said.
"So just a gene, by itself, the variant doesn't really dramatically affect behaviour, but under certain environmental conditions there is a big difference."
In the Whanganui Chronicle on January 8, Chester Borrows, the former Minister for Courts with associate portfolios for justice and social development, wrote: "Over 70 per cent of people in [New Zealand] jails have suffered head trauma."
A study by researchers at Harvard University, the University of Southern California (USC), the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Iowa, on brain damage shows that emotion plays an important role in scenarios that pose a moral dilemma.
If certain emotions are blocked, we make decisions that — right or wrong — seem unnaturally cold.
Co-senior author Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard, said: "Our work provides the first causal account of the role of emotions in moral judgments.
"What is absolutely astonishing about our results is how selective the deficit is.
"Damage to the frontal lobe leaves intact a suite of moral problem-solving abilities, but damages judgments in which an aversive action is put into direct conflict with a strong utilitarian outcome."
Ralph Adolphs, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology, commented: "Because of their brain damage, they have abnormal social emotions in real life. They seem to lack empathy and compassion."
But Hauser cautions: "Not all moral reasoning depends so strongly on emotion."
Many cultures very quickly realised this inherent or acquired violent streak and introduced taboos that became prescriptive.
A notable example is the Ten Commandments, the sixth of which clearly states: "Thou shall not kill/slay/murder".
Because of inter-tribal fighting, the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands established "Nunuku's Law" — named after the pacifist chief Nunuka-whenua — which forbade "war, cannibalism and killing in any form". Unfortunately, they paid a heavy price for this custom as they nearly were wiped off the map by another mainland Maori tribe.
And Black Panther member George Jackson said of the non-violent tactics of Martin Luther King Jr in the United States civil rights campaign: "The concept of non-violence is a false ideal.
"It presupposes the existence of compassion and a sense of justice on the part of one's adversary. When this adversary has everything to lose and nothing to gain by exercising justice and compassion, his reaction can only be negative."
So, until as a society, we accept this dark side in us and we re-prescribe a taboo against us taking another person's life, and also children are encouraged to show and practice empathy at a very young age, we will not be able to deal with this predisposition.
Christodoulos Moisa is a Whanganui-based artist and writer
