The foundation runs the Loves-Me-Not programme in schools, educating female Year 12 students about healthy (equal) relationships as opposed to unhealthy (controlling) ones. The programme aims to reduce domestic violence. In the more than six years since Sophie's killing, about 80 New Zealand women have died at the hands of a partner or former partner.
However, I think Lesley Elliott's message is powerful not just in saving lives of women who are in crisis-type relationships but in raising the consciousness of young women about choosing positive connections. I never got beaten up, but my first romantic relationships as a teenager were fraught and awful and one-sided and led to a lot of self-loathing. They were definitely not equal or healthy.
If I had been more aware I had a choice to be attracted to people who treated me well, I wonder if I might have chosen a different path in life. I might have expected to give love and be loved, in an equal way, rather than feeling I had to earn admiration, feebly in some cases, what with my cassette mix tapes of rare New Order 12-inch remixes and airmailed copies of NME.
I was always deeply ashamed of what therapist and self-help author Howard Halpern calls "attachment hunger", even though I didn't even know what it was. There is nothing wrong with attachment hunger, it is just how you choose to get your attachment needs met.
Halpern says you can stop yourself choosing to hook up with destructive people, what he calls your attachment fetish person: "You can ... stop yourself being with someone who may meet many of your attachment hunger needs for fusion and security but who is otherwise inappropriate and wrong for you."
There is so much effort and emphasis put into teaching young women to get qualifications and achieve in material ways, with perhaps little awareness that attending to one's emotional life can be just as important. Less algebra and more don't-hook-up-with-bastards.
Of course, this applies to young men, too, although biologically, women have more to lose. In The Science of Love and Betrayal, Oxford University Professor Robin Dunbar uses hard data to show how choosing our first partner can have wide-ranging and detrimental effects, especially for women.
The real problem is that the penalties of getting it wrong are massive. Because of the way reproductive biology works, especially in mammals, it is the females that ultimately have the most at stake from botched choices.
This has always been true, but things are more dangerous now than when I was a teenager. With online dating and apps like Tinder, we are able to be more unfeeling and austere in relationships. We can say different things in a text than when we look into someone's eyes.
There is a Milgram kind of cruelty in breaking up with someone by text. (In the famous Milgram experiment, participants were able to inflict massive, fatal-level electric shocks on a stranger if the stranger was sitting in a different room so they didn't have to see their "victim". The shocks weren't real, but the participants didn't know that.)
I'm not pointing the finger at men or anyone else over text breakups: I have done it myself. But these days people can have whole, long, important relationships when psychologically in "different rooms". Being real and being human is so much harder and more messy.
"What passes for hip, cynical transcendence of sentiment is really a fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic," the late American writer David Foster Wallace said.
These days I know there is no shame in being gooey or needing other people. If only I had got that lesson 30 years ago. Bravo Lesley Elliott. And thank you, Sophie.
