By JAN CORBETT
It looks like a regular house in a regular suburban street. But we cannot tell you where it is, or show you a photograph, because to the women and children arriving at the gate, it is their only refuge from the violence and emotional abuse that goes on in other regular houses in suburban streets.
Keeping this house safe means keeping its location confidential.
Inside, a young Maori woman reads a book that promises to show her how to turn her life around. Downstairs, children are being taught to overcome the effects of seeing family violence.
Merepeka Raukawa-Tait is surprised the Herald has come with a male photographer, but after a discussion with the local manager, he is allowed to stay.
Men are not usually welcome in women's refuges. The mere sight of them can distress women who have suffered from the fists and taunts of partners.
Yet many of the sensitivities surrounding battered women are new to Ms Raukawa-Tait. Unlike most of the women working for refuges, she has never been a victim, although she saw her mother beaten at a time when few thought it a crime.
That she did not come up through the ranks - battered woman to refuge worker - irked some members when she was appointed chief executive in May last year. They feared she had arrived to corporatise their collective organisation.
In a way, she had.
Not only does she look drop-dead corporate in her elegant designer suit, scarf and wool coat, but she is strong on the rhetoric of efficiency and accountability.
Less surprising, then, to learn she buys her clothes from op-shops, avoiding the secondhand clothing stores where she says the prices are outrageous.
She has owned a small business, been a local-body politician, holds a master of business administration degree and is constantly under pressure from friends about why she wastes her talents in non-profit organisations, where she earns half what she could in the private sector.
Under her stewardship the National Collective of Independent Women's Refuges is taking on a new image: no longer a bunch of middleclass do-gooders offering a bed and a teddy bear to women and children who have been knocked around, it is now a political lobby group with views on everything from the laws governing families and parenting to economic and social policy.
That is one of the reasons the board decided last year to wind up the Women's Refuge Foundation, the fundraising branch made up of high-profile middleclass women such as economist Suzanne Snively, and do the fundraising themselves.
Paradoxically, this drive to transform Women's Refuge into a focused, disciplined and politicised organisation is why the $350,000 raised from last year's annual appeal is still sitting in a bank account.
Previously, takings were divided between the 56 refuges scattered around the country. Each received several thousand dollars, or as Ms Raukawa-Tait describes it, "enough to pay for repairs to the van and possibly a new carpet."
She considers divvying the money up like that unwise and ineffective.
Instead, she wants maintenance costs paid from the $3.9 million of Government funding that Women's Refuge receives each year, and for money raised from the public to be used for extras such as the cost of flying staff to training sessions in Wellington or linking the refuges by computer.
But Women's Refuge is a collective to which the chief executive can only make recommendations. Decision-making takes time and the April deadline passed with still no policy in place.
Ms Raukawa-Tait says the eight-member governing body will wait until her report on the organisation is presented to this year's conference in September before deciding how the public's money will be spent. Even then she is prepared to wait until next year if necessary to get an agreement.
She has no hesitation about launching another public appeal this week knowing the proceeds from last year have still not gone to needy refuges or battered women and children.
In the meantime, she has also gone to the Government asking it to double its funding, so far without success.
She admits to being "over at the Beehive quite often now, thank God." And when TVNZ's Face The Nation programme wanted someone to represent the views of the underprivileged in its post-Budget discussion, Ms Raukawa-Tait was chosen to fill the chair.
Although she praised the Budget as being a good start in addressing social ills, she has no allegiance to the Labour-Alliance Coalition. The only time she has worked for a political party, it was National.
And while feisty and articulate, she has no political ambitions because Parliament, she says, is not where the real work is done.
Last year, Women's Refuge dealt with 7000 women and 10,000 children living in violent relationships, half of them Maori.
She acknowledges that affluent women who have been abused seldom resort to a refuge, but they do call looking for information about their rights and options.
Not all abused women flee their homes and Women's Refuge is doing more work with victims in the community, encouraging them to form healthier relationships.
Says Ms Raukawa-Tait: "We get them to look at how they have ended up in their situation because most of them don't realise it's about power and control.
"Most of them don't realise they have rights. Most of them don't realise they're entitled to an income if they move away from home.
"There is a view that we're man-haters and we break up families. But what we do is say to women, 'You do have choices. You have every right to live in a violence-free home and a violence-free community.'
"It's domestic violence that breaks up families."
Women's Refuge now a political lobby group
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