Working to beat bogey of violence

CATHERINE MASTERS looks for the silver lining in a sorry tale of violence that has marred many New Zealand families.

New Zealand went looking for child abuse and domestic violence - and found it in abundance.

Depressing as it was, the fact we even looked is something to be proud of because it makes the country stand out from many other nations, says Dame Silvia Cartwright, who after eight years is soon to step down from a United Nations body that aims to end discrimination against women.

Many countries have not even begun to delve into the underbelly of family life and hidden violence, preferring to believe it is not there, she says. But if they looked, they would find it.

In New Zealand non-governmental organisations, such as women's refuges, domestic abuse organisations and groups such as anti-abuse campaigners Parentline, saw abuse every day and began insisting that policy be formulated to deal with it.

The outcome has been changes to domestic violence laws and initiatives such as a police decision several years ago to start treating family violence as an ordinary crime, which has had a huge impact.

She hopes the attitude will one day come in New Zealand that nobody would expect to get away with child abuse and domestic violence.

And while the furore over the high incidence of child abuse might hurt and shock New Zealanders, it was a process that had to be gone through for the sake of future generations.

"We are actually trying to do something, and I believe that's why it looks so bad. We've found it. It's a terrible thing to have to go through, but I think we have to place it in a much broader context.

"I'm hoping that in a couple of generations the current incidence of this sort of violence, both physical and sexual, will reduce because ... it's no longer hidden."

The High Court judge, who will be sworn in next year as Governor-General, says New Zealand is held in high esteem by representatives from other countries in the United Nations for its attempts to deal with the problem.

Models from New Zealand - especially the Youth Court and care and protection system - had been studied and sometimes applied in other countries.

Family group conferences were widely admired and copied as a means of reducing youth offending, she said.

Her time with the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women had been absorbing and the committee had achieved a lot, she said.

Violence against women was not mentioned in the 1970s, so her committee drafted a general recommendation and now nations must report on it.

At the same time, in the mid-1990s, the UN General Assembly drafted and adopted a declaration on violence against women.

It was an extensive definition of violence and included the sort that New Zealand was accustomed to seeing.

"That is family violence in the home, beatings and refusals to allow the wife to use the cheque book and the car, those sorts of everyday examples.

"It also incorporates the more exotic sorts of violence that somehow we in New Zealand tend to think are far worse than the ones we perpetrate or suffer, things like female genital mutilation, foetal selection for sex, good nutrition for boys rather than girls, all those sorts of things.

"We think that it's more exotic, but the reality is that every country has its own peculiar form of violence and ours happens to be largely family violence, particularly against women and girl children."

Dame Silvia said a colleague from Ghana on the committee was horrified to hear some of the New Zealand child sexual abuse cases Dame Silvia had presided over, saying they would never happen in Ghana.

But Ghana still had areas where girls were sold into slavery for the local religious groups.

"They are working on stamping that out but that strikes us as appalling - but our sort of violence struck her as horrifying, so don't let's characterise it as something that only happens overseas.

"There's no country in the world where women and children are given the equivalent status of the men in the family - there is just no country in the world."

Herald Online feature: Violence at home

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