Family violence 'under-reported, under-prosecuted and under-identified'

Aotearoa has highest reported rate of family violence against women in the developed world, with between a half to a third of all women experiencing abuse in their lifetime, and experts worry that budget cuts in the family violence sector are going to make the fight against abuse a lot harder.

Family violence numbers have remained stagnant for decades, even as evidence shows the vast majority are never reported.

The fight for legal support

Not long after their whirlwind romance, Christchurch woman Shannon Williams' new partner needed somewhere to live. Given he had been hanging out at her place a lot anyhow, he soon moved in with her and young son.

She said things were good for less than a week.

"I felt like I was walking on eggshells, having to hold myself to an unrealistic standard to avoid him getting angry. The anger wasn't always directed at me, but it was enough to make me feel quite uncomfortable in my own home."

But things would get much worse, when a few drinks at home with friends turned into a violent rage.

"Everything was good, we were all having a really good night. I don't know what happened, but he kicked off - he ended up quite violent, he started smashing up the house.

"He caused about $20,000 of damage to my property."

Police were called, and her ex-partner spent a night in custody, but apologetic and embarrassed, he eventually convinced her to give him another chance.

Eventually he would be charged and convicted following another incident.

As a solicitor, she had an advantage when applying for the protection order, which she had within 24 hours, but acknowledged getting legal support is an issue for many women.

University of Auckland associate professor Carrie Leonetti calls this the privatisation of victim safety - placing the onus on the victim to protect themselves from revictimisation - which she notes violates New Zealand's obligations under several international human rights conventions.

"The Convention against Torture and Inhumane Treatment, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the United Nations Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child - all of these international human rights conventions put obligations on state parties to protect victims from violence and not to make victims grab a torch and a pitchfork and protect themselves."

The restraining orders people get under the Harassment Act in many other countries would be handled by the police, she said.

"We still largely leave the job of protecting themselves to victims in New Zealand and they're already victims of domestic violence. The last thing they need is to have to get lawyers and go to court to get restraining orders, to get Protection Orders, to get child support, to get occupancy orders from the house."

Leonetti said most countries treated those procedures as a police prosecution function, where they would facilitate securing occupancy of the house and getting a protection order. And while they did not arrange child support, they will enforce an order if a parent did not pay.

"In New Zealand, we still largely have a self help regime."

Instead of protecting victims from revictimisation, "we push it on to victims and make them do it through old clunky, expensive, inefficient civil procedures".

Police changes

Despite the stubborn statistics of shame, there are fears a recent policy shift by police could lead to less family violence incidents being attended, investigated or prosecuted.

Earlier this year, Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said police attendance to family harm callouts had increased 80 percent in 10 years and was "not sustainable", but that the proposed changes, which had been trailed for six months in 2023, were under consideration.

University of Auckland associate professor Carrie Leonetti said she had grave concerns about the impact of the changes.

She said the problem stemmed from the decision - dating back several years - to include family violence under the more amorphous term of family harm, which conflated criminal and non-criminal offences.

Police say they will still respond to crimes, making a decision based on the 111 call as to whether the harm is criminal family violence, non criminal forms of family violence - such as coercive controlling behaviour, financial and emotional abuse - or other issues such as mental health problems, substance use or people arguing.

But Leonetti said she was "baffled" police believe they can accurately distinguish between family violence from non-family violent family harm, without showing up on the doorstep and reading between the lines.

"If somebody makes a 111 call and the perpetrator is standing in the room, they are not at liberty to disclose everything they need to. Or if the neighbour calls, how would the police figure out talking to the next door neighbour whether they need to respond to that home or not?"

In the absence of coding those things differently when the calls are taken and triaged, there is no data to know if the police position - that they are only avoiding non-criminal non-family violence forms of family harm - is true, she said.

"There is evidence from around the world, including Aotearoa New Zealand, that police are getting called out to cases that involve crimes and family violence, and not treating them as such."

Leonetti also warned that the non-response could make a victim's situation substantially worse, destroying trust in authorities and emboldening the perpetrator.

"The thing that keeps me up at night is, very few people call the police for family violence. On average, intimate partner violence victims call the police after the seventh or eighth occurrence.

"So this is a person who hasn't called, hasn't called, hasn't called, and if - when they finally call - don't get a good response, they'll never try again.

"That we're missing those opportunities is a tragedy, and it's a tragedy of the creation of our own policy."

She said it was particularly frustrating given Aotearoa actually had strong laws, but family violence remained "under-reported, under-prosecuted and under-identified".

"New Zealand has some of the best family violence legislation on paper that I've seen, but some of the worst rates of family violence, and some of the worst systemic responses."

Overseas models

University of Auckland professor in social and community health Janet Fanslow said there were overseas models that had shown huge promise in dramatically lowering family violence rates.

Much of what New Zealand has been doing in the past two decades has been about increasing recognition of violence, often targeted at the victims of family violence, encouraging them to leave the relationship and seek help.

While that's an important message, Fanslow wanted to see more investment in evidence-based strategies.

"There are evidence-based prevention strategies that have been used elsewhere in the world which have seen dramatic decreases in intimate partner violence - I'm talking a 50 percent decrease in four years."

While she acknowledged the importance of New Zealand developing "home grown solutions", Fanslow said we could learn a lot from successful international models.

"Some of the successful strategies seen overseas are more community based, involving both men and women, exploring power and the use of power in relationships.

"It's a great way to flip the discussion so violence becomes seen as a manifestation of power, which can be used in ways that go over the top of other people to suppress them, or you can think about power not as a zero-sum game.

"It's been a transformational strategy elsewhere, because it brings men on board into the conversation, and it gives everyone a positive thing to move to."

She said other well-evaluated programmes included those working with men, especially when they become new fathers.

"That's a great entry, because men are interested in being good fathers, in being good parents and good partners, but we need to have the conversation with people about what that looks like, and how do you negotiate and do things like conflict resolution in ways that aren't about getting your own way at the expense of other people."

Fanslow said funding cuts to the sector were counterproductive, especially cuts to parenting programmes.

She said there was strong evidence showing the programmes' ability to engage parents and benefit children, and their cost effectiveness.

"By supporting people to develop safe, stable and nurturing relationships with their children and giving people the skills and resources for that, it has long term benefits for the kids, and for society.

"It's across all of those domains we say we're interested in - we say we're interested in better educational outcomes, we say we're interested in less crime, we say we're interested in better health - actually our relationships, and the quality of those relationships, influence all of those domains."

A 2014 economic estimate - which put the cost of family violence at $4-7 billion a year - is likely a significant underestimate given increased costs, and what researchers were now learning about the long term health impacts of abuse, she said.

Shannon Williams said the help she and her son received from Barnados was invaluable. She found the group meetings for the women's safety programme were important for her journey.

"Before then, I don't think I realised that some of the things I experienced were abuse. It was really empowering to just sit in a room with a group of other ladies who had a similar experience - that was really healing, just to know I'm not alone and I'm not crazy.

"We tend to internalise it and think there's something wrong with us, especially when you have someone constantly degrading you and devaluing you, you start to think, this is me, I'm the one causing this anger - but you can start to step back and say I wasn't doing anything wrong, this is their problem to figure out. That was really empowering."