Need to halt domestic violence
12 March 2005

Domestic violence permeates our society, writes Emma Davies. It can be successfully addressed only when we challenge the social norms where it is condoned as a means of resolving conflicts.

Statistics from the Centre for International Crime Prevention indicate that 12 million Africans were sold as slaves to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries, a period of 300 years.

Yet in the last 30 years, in the Asia-Pacific region, Unicef estimates that trafficking in women and children for commercial sexual purposes has victimised 30 million people.

The trafficking of women and children for sex amounts to the largest slave trade in history, says Unicef's deputy executive director. It is the context for the images of child pornography seized recently on the computers of some Kiwis. Built on greed and abuse of power, it has become a global multimillion- dollar industry and is a sickening example of the market at work.

Domestic violence is also built on the abuse of power. It also permeates our backyard.

It is tempting to believe that domestic violence occurs only in other people's communities. If we are rich, it is easy to blame the poor. I have heard some Maori claim that there was no family violence before colonisation. Some pakeha believe it is only brown people who beat their women and children.

In reality, violence against women and children does not seem to be confined to one culture or one time in history. Neither is it reserved to those who live in poverty. Nevertheless, poverty does exacerbate risks and limit options.

A recent study by University of Auckland researcher Dr Janet Fanslow found that 33 per cent of Auckland women and 39 per cent of rural Waikato women "have experienced at least one act of physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime". One in 20 had experienced it in the last year.

Of that one in 20, 89.6 per cent in rural Waikato and 72.5 per cent in urban Auckland were parenting children. These children, too, suffered the effects of domestic violence. To use a phrase from United States neurobiologist Professor Bruce Perry, who was in Auckland this month, many are literally "incubated in terror".

Witnessing domestic violence often has the same psychological and developmental effects as being a direct victim of abuse. Children experience fear and intimidation, even when adults do not think they can hear or see the violence.

Many of these children, between 30 per cent and 75 per cent, depending on how the statistics are measured, are also physically abused by those supposed to care for them.

It doesn't stop there. Survivors talk about the humiliation and emotional annihilation as being the most harmful long-term effects, more so than the physical injuries.

Women can also abuse their power. Some violence, particularly against children, is perpetrated by women. Half the child deaths by maltreatment in rich nations are at the hands of women. If we consider the greater amount of time women and men spend with children, the percentages look quite different.

The physical and mental health effects of domestic violence include depression, drug abuse and chronic illness, as well as physical injury.

Children who are incubated in terror are robbed of their right to security and lose the innocence of their childhoods. They are more likely to grow up to commit violent crime and show no remorse, and more likely to parent the next generation as victims or perpetrators of violence. And so the cycle goes on.

A study commissioned by the Brisbane City Council estimated that the economic costs of domestic violence on businesses and corporations was more than $A1.5 billion ($NZ1.6b) in 1999. This included direct costs, such as absenteeism, staff turnover and lost productivity, and indirect costs, such as the tax share of public-sector costs.

With narrower terms of reference, the US National Centre for Injury Prevention and Control estimated that $US727.8 million ($NZ975m) was the cost in one year of lost employment related to rape, assault and stalking victimisations of women by intimate partners.

In New Zealand, based on a domestic-violence prevalence rate of one in seven working women, economist Suzanne Snively estimated that domestic violence costs employers $2.9m in lost working days and productivity annually.

Different methodologies and terms of reference make inter- country comparisons impossible, but the point remains: domestic violence costs businesses.

As we debate whether or how to engage more women in the paid workforce, we need to acknowledge that violence against women is a big barrier to participation.

Women living with domestic violence talk of partners preventing them from working or undermining their attempts to further their education or careers. Some women talk about the struggles of keeping up employment, be it the shame of a black eye, or harassment by their partner at work.

Children are often used as pawns in these power games. Sleep- deprived, life in turmoil and in a state of perpetual crisis, it is hard, if not impossible, to be a consistent parent or a reliable employee.

Domestic violence not only costs employers and taxpayers through our health, welfare and justice systems, it prevents women and children from contributing more to the development of the nation.

What can we do about it?

In looking across countries and cultures, evidence suggests that societies with the greatest structural inequalities demonstrate the highest levels of social distress and dislocation, leading to a higher incidence of a number of related social issues.

Evidence also suggests that a focus on the needs of pregnant women and the very young has the most powerful long-term benefits.

If we try to prevent domestic violence as a compartmentalised problem, we are likely to have only minimal success. It is unrealistic to expect our domestic-violence and criminal-justice agencies to prevent family violence on their own.

I hope that the proposed family- violence safety teams will increase police responsiveness, the safety of women and children and the accountability of offenders, but these teams can only serve as an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. They may be part of the picture of solutions, but they are not the essence of those solutions.

Our task is to challenge the social norms of society where violence is passively or actively condoned as an appropriate means of conflict resolution.

Violence prevention has to become a genuine long-term priority for society, through our maraes, churches, mosques, schools, sports clubs, workplaces and democratically elected leaders.

Economists can't continue to lead our decision-making in how to deal with social problems. If professional economists were doctors, says Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul, they would be mired with malpractice suits.

Economists have failed in their attempts to apply models and theories to the reality of our civilisation. Violence is part of that reality.

Perhaps this helps to explain why we have a situation in New Zealand where we haven't been able to act on an apparent increase in public awareness of domestic violence over recent years.

Perhaps our public service has become too fixated on efficiency at the expense of effectiveness in our approaches to social problems. Effective solutions are about content and policy delivery. They are about what we do. They require us to think creatively and learn from our mistakes. Yet our institutions are run by managers.

To manage risk and ensure accountability for expenditure is, of course, admirable, but to do this at the expense of critical thinking and the creativity of the movers and shakers in our communities is ultimately self-destructive.

As Saul says: "A managerial elite manages. A crisis, unfortunately, requires thought. Thought is not a management function."

Risk managers will not provide the paths to preventing violence. Perhaps one of the biggest risks is that they inhibit those who might.

Dr Emma Davies is a member of the Institute of Public Policy at the Auckland Institute of Technology.