Community battles drunken violence

Petrina Marsh

A unique attempt to mobilise a community against alcohol-fuelled violence will be launched in Rotorua.

The Ministry of Justice crime prevention unit has agreed to give the Rotorua District Council $80,000 a year for two years for a co-ordinator to work with community groups to create a strategy to deal with alcohol and violence.

At the same time, residents in the Fordlands area, where Once Were Warriors author Alan Duff grew up, are planning a grassroots initiative to reduce aggression against children.

Resident Petrina Marsh, a former Plunket kai awhina (educator), is working with two other nurses and a former teacher to develop a group therapy programme for families where violence occurs after drinking binges.

"We are going to start with here. Then we'll extend it out and then we'll have to look for some funding."

Rotorua's Lakes District Health Board has the country's second-highest rate of assaulted children hospitalised after Counties-Manukau, where 3-month-old twins Chris and Cru Kahui were battered to death last month.

Ann Edhouse, deputy principal of Fordlands' Sunset Junior High School, said her students identified strongly with the twins and wanted to do something. "I had big boys in tears in the classroom. Our children were quite distressed."

Rotorua liquor licensing officer Julie Smale already runs late-night checks at pubs with Maori wardens and Toi Te Ora public health officers to catch publicans serving drinkers who are under-age or drunk.

"We take cases to the Liquor Licensing Authority on a regular basis. We took five cases last year."

She gets teenagers under the legal age of 18 to buy alcohol, then prosecutes the stores that sell to them. This has been less successful because the courts usually discharge without conviction or impose fines well below the legal maximum of $10,000, and the licensing authority suspends the stores' licences for only 24 or 48 hours.

"The courts don't recognise the severity of it, in my opinion," she said.

The Ministry of Social Development's Bay of Plenty social development manager, psychologist Susan Jolley, hopes the new co-ordinator will go into an area such as Fordlands and try to get a community-wide agreement that people should stop drinking if it is likely to lead to violence.

"Most effective change occurs in a community. It takes a community to raise a child. It's asking, what are the behaviours that occur when a person is drinking? It's saying that if you are going to be drinking, those behaviours are unacceptable when you do drink.

"So if you see a person getting very drunk and starting to display violent tendencies, do you walk away and leave them to assault their family, or do you take some action?

"If there is threatening behaviour the police can act, but I'm not suggesting people should always call the police. It's the community - they are drinking with people. People in the community need to say: 'That's not acceptable.' All it takes is for one person to stand up and say: 'Don't do that, mate, it's not acceptable.' "

Crime prevention unit director Jeremy Wood said community co-ordinators on alcohol and violence were being financed in Rotorua, Gisborne and Queenstown for two years to support local initiatives.

In Queenstown, the problem was mainly young people from out of town drinking in the town centre in the tourist season. But it was just a coincidence that Rotorua and Queenstown were top tourist destinations.

"If this says Rotorua, Gisborne and Queenstown are hotbeds of violence, that will do harm to what we are trying to achieve.

"We didn't pick them because they are violent parts of the country, which they are not, but because they have a local commitment and were developing new ways of thinking."