Maori service to help families

Cindy Kiro. Photo / NZPA

A programme aiming to head off family violence within a growing Maori "underclass" is being launched in Waitakere today.

A group of Maori working in state and non-government agencies in West Auckland have got together to work with families as soon as police report a family violence incident involving a Maoriwhanau.

The Methodist Mission's Lifewise Family Services has appointed a Maori manager, Tiaria Fletcher, and two Maori social workers in a new "Awhi Whanau" service to work with what is expected to be a large number of Maori families.

"It's going to be a lot. In the West there are about 100 [family violence incident reports] a week," Ms Fletcher said.

"Maori are 13 per cent of the population, but are more than 30 per cent of the family violence notifications."

A report prepared for the project by former Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro has found that this over-representation of Maori is mainly because of their poverty.

Dr Kiro has recommended "early and effective intervention" in a way which "builds on respectful relationships with whanau".

Ms Fletcher said her social workers would aim to work on socio-economic factors, such as helping families to find work and good housing, and cultural factors such as reconnecting with their whakapapa or wider family heritage.

"We have to address a growing underclass within the Maori communities, which is where we are seeing the worst in terms of family violence and child abuse," she said.

"The research goes back historically in terms of urbanisation of the Maori community and how that [cultural] disconnection and poverty and all those things are contributing to what is a growing underclass."

She said male offenders would continue to be directed to men's programmes run by Man Alive in Henderson, but the new service recognised that 90 per cent of women who were the victims of family violence wanted to stay in their relationships.

"We have to work with them as a couple, work with their relationship, and get both of them to focus on to their relationships with their children as a way of change."