A United Nation's agency is to investigate the little-talked about role of violence in Pacific cultures.
By Deborah Diaz and NZPA
Island leaders say scrutiny of domestic violence in the Pacific is long overdue.
They have welcomed a five-year United Nations study into abuse in the Pacific Islands, which aims to devise strategies toreduce the number of women beaten in their homes.
The Pacific Islands Women's Refuge in South Auckland says education is urgently needed to address what is a widespread but little talked about problem.
Manager Ani James said the refuge had sheltered women who were getting help for the first time after years of abuse in island countries, where the law offered less protection.
Abuse flowered in traditional relationships gone awry: husbands were the head of the family and women wanted to be obedient wives, but pressures, usually financial, saw men seeking power and control through violence.
The Samoan Advisory Council chairman and Pacific Safer Community Trust spokesman, Fa'amatuainu Tino Pereira, said violence had become ingrained in Pacific communities and culture but there was no excuse for abuse.
He warned that researchers working on the five-year study would encounter a male-dominated society that saw nothing wrong with violence.
That could potentially make the violence worse if men reacted stubbornly to the outsiders, he said.
He had himself grown-up in a "very typical, very violent family."
"All I knew about right and wrong was when I was bashed. If we were living in New Zealand, my parents would have been put in jail."
He was concerned that violence against women and children was still prevalent in the islands and in New Zealand.
"Fa'asamoa [the Samoan way] is not about abuse.
"Beating up your wife or your kids is not my culture, no way," Mr Pereira said.
He said his culture was about good relationships, not violence, and men needed to realise the consequences of their actions.
"What is the point of saying you love your kids or wife but then beating them?
"We've been doing this for a long, long time but what are the implications of our actions?"
The study, paid for by the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, will cover the distinctive ethnic regions of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia.
