Pact a strategy against violence

Masterton man Aaron Awa, 32, made a pact with his wife when they married that he would never repeat his father's violence with his own kids.
His father was a "hard man" prone to violent outbursts.
"I remember joking with him when I was a kid - and at the drop of a hat he'd flip," he said.
His father - who died when he was 11 - was his only masculine role model and in a typical intergenerational spiral reaching across class and race he reckons his dad probably learned his parenting approach from his own father. However, he said there was hope - it just took someone to stand up and make a change. "Stopping family violence will take a couple of generations but someone's got to get the ball rolling."
He and his wife had sat down when they got married and discussed the fine line between discipline and abuse in the context of his own upbringing in Masterton.
"I grew up on the East Side and if you had a disagreement there was only normally one way to settle it - you'd choose fists instead of talking. That's how I thought you handled conflict and disagreement. So it hasn't always been easy bringing the kids up in a structured home - kids know which buttons to push."
Mr Awa said things had come to a head a year ago when his own son was 12 - early adolescence is a testing time for many relationships between father and son and the incident tested his non-violent resolve. "He was coming into that age and a couple of times he had struggled with voicing his opinion. It came to a head and we had a big disagreement and I stopped short of knocking him. I didn't hit him but I lost the plot. That's when I recognised things could have got a whole lot worse - the way I reacted wasn't in a loving, supportive, fatherly way.
"It made me take a step back and think that my initial reaction wasn't how I thought I would react - my emotions got the better of me."
It was that incident that prompted Mr Awa to take part in a Wairarapa Family Violence Network stopping violence course. "They help you recognise your triggers. You've got to recognise the steps - there is a build-up to you losing the plot. You need guidance from someone that's detached and outside the situation." Because of the counselling his relationship with his son had improved.