Family violence system failing survivors, report findsA new report examining New Zealand’s family violence system reveals serious shortcomings and calls for urgent changes.New Zealand’s family violence system places unsafe demands on those seeking help, delivers fragmented responses and offers limited practical assistance, according to the academics behind a new report. They say the system treats family violence as a victim-survivor’s mental health issue, distrusts the people it’s meant to serve, disproportionately fails wāhine Māori and colludes with men using violence. However, they say there is hope, with examples of safe, relational practice among kaupapa Māori services and practitioners. The report, led by Professor Julia Tolmie (University of Auckland) with Rachel Smith (AUT) and independent researcher Leah Robinson (Ngāruahine), examines five women’s experiences of the family violence response system, including their agency files. The agencies involved in the analysis include the police, Oranga Tamariki, refuges and specialist family violence services, the Ministry of Social Development, health services, housing providers, courts, education providers and legal services. Tolmie (Auckland Law School) says the women dealt with hundreds of professionals over decades, generating thousands of pages of records. She’s not aware of comparable research examining victim-survivors’ original agency records. Tolmie, Smith and Robinson found that victim-survivors are being failed by a “fragmented, punitive and monocultural system” that can compound the harm they experience. They say this was evident not only in the women’s accounts, but also in their agency records. “While some practitioners provided valuable support, responses were often unhelpful, unsafe, and at times extremely harmful,” Tolmie says. The women described being repeatedly referred between services without receiving meaningful help. In Ngākau’s* words: “They would sit down… all love and caring … [you would] say your story and then what you needed help for … and I soon learnt that … you would never hear from them again. “…. when I got into emergency transitional housing …I would get random phone calls… some…NGO, talking about my housing and it was the same narrative every time…” This is confirmed by Ngākau’s agency records, which show she was contacted many times over the three-and-a-half-year period she was in emergency housing to discuss her accommodation needs, before she was given a lecture on the difficulty of meeting those needs and a ranking score for her level of need, followed by no further action. Smith, an academic at AUT who has worked in the family violence sector for over 20 years in Aotearoa and the UK, says the women’s experiences reveal “a system built on distrust of those it serves.” In times of crisis, she says the women, with limited resources and the responsibility of parenting young children, had to repeatedly “jump through hoops to receive the meagre resources that they were entitled to and needed for survival”. Ngākau, who lives with permanent injuries from intimate partner violence, was repeatedly required to obtain medical certificates to access financial and educational support. “We have to explain our permanent injuries to multiple people on multiple different platforms, multiple times a year,” she said. Tolmie, who chaired the Family Violence Death Review Committee for six years and is a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi, says, “We found that services often reframed the survivor’s experience of abuse as a mental health issue rather than focussing on the family violence they’re experiencing.” Ava’s* partner appears in her records across multiple service providers over more than a decade, successfully having his version of her behaviour, mental health and addiction issues recorded as the truth. “The women’s experiences in this study suggest system collusion with the predominant aggressors of intimate partner violence that’s so widespread it’s hard to see it as a series of individual instances of successful manipulation, as opposed to a feature of the systemic response itself,” reads the report. Robinson, an independent researcher with a background in law, frontline family violence support and community advocacy adds, “The records show how negative assumptions about the women became embedded in decisions that compounded the harm they experienced.” The report says three of the women described responses to their requests for help after leaving abusive partners as being so harmful that, in retrospect, they questioned whether it would have been preferable to have stayed and tolerated the abuse. This, say the researchers, is because their involvement with agencies exposed them to practices they experienced as “degrading, coercive, and destabilising”. Furthermore, this involvement resulted in the “loss of irreplaceable dimensions of their lives, including the capacity to care for and protect their children, as well as material lifelines such as financial security and a home that they owned”. The researchers suggest the problems they highlight reflect structural features and values embedded in the system, rather than just poor coordination. They say wāhine Māori are particularly poorly served by approaches grounded in individualistic, Eurocentric ways of operating. However, they say there was “a depth of relational reciprocity and awhi” offered by several kaupapa Māori services and practitioners to three study participants. In particular, the report describes the response of the Manaaki Tangata e Rua programme at Te Puea Memorial Marae to Māreikura* and her tamariki. Here, kaimahi used their relationships with state agencies to bring services directly to her, reducing her exposure to the “fragmented” state system. Māreikura encountered “relational, respectful and positive acknowledgement” of her role as a Māori māmā and the efforts she was making, rather than an assumption that she was doing something wrong. The researchers suggest a Māori-centred approach to systems change could improve outcomes for everyone, not only Māori. “All victim-survivors would benefit from an approach that’s holistic, relational, mana-enhancing, culturally safe and focused on the provision of equitable material support,” they write. The deep systems change needed to respond to family violence safely won’t be easy, they say, it will take time, and Māori leadership and governance, in partnership with Pākehā. “Māori leadership, governance and oversight offer the greatest potential to transform the system for all victim-survivors and their families and whānau,” they write. “If we don’t want more of the same – and we believe that the participants’ experiences as set out in this report powerfully illustrate why we should not be attached to the status quo – then it’s time to have the courage and foresight to do things differently.” |
NZ Law – Family violence system failing survivors, report finds
