As Australia steps up, NZ must not step back over family violence

Opinion: With Australia rolling out new policies and funding to deal with increased violence against women, it’s time for New Zealand to reflect on its own culture of violence, writes Sarah Brown.

Some years ago, I was working a few shifts a week on our national domestic violence helplines.

As I listened to the wide range of everyday New Zealanders calling up in need of support, I came to understand the enormity of the beast that is family harm in this country. I also realised the roots of this violence were multi-generational and incredibly nuanced.

I saw the brutal reality of never having enough funding or staff to properly cater to the sheer volume of family violence victims.

There just weren’t enough beds in refuge, never enough front-line police to respond to all the reports of violence. There were months and months of waiting for therapists to become available – and that was if you could even afford or access them in the first place.

Some of the calls I took back then were from tired social workers, teachers, and medical professionals, themselves struggling after caseloads became unmanageable, yet still trying to find support for the clients they had.

For many of those shifts on the frontline, I felt that all I could offer was an empathetic ear and it was, frankly, disheartening.

I could see our country didn’t have what was needed to manage the widespread impacts of family harm. Surely, I thought, it was in our best interest to do a better job of preventing it to begin with.

Violent people are made, not born

I was particularly interested in the group of people that committed this violence: men. How had they become these violent perpetrators of harm?

I thought, if we were willing and able to be curious about how New Zealand came to have the highest rate of intimate partner violence against women in the OCED, then what could we learn about ourselves as a society?

During the many years I’ve been working in this area, I’ve learned that perpetrators of violence are not born; they are, in fact, predominantly made by us – shaped by generations of trauma, neglect, systemic racism, the generational effects of colonisation and war, loss of identity, land and culture, and a lack of access to decent mental health care and basic empathy.

It also doesn’t help that for generations our boys have been pushed into a box of behaviour that is unrealistic.

No human being can be endlessly strong, work tirelessly, hold back their tears and stay emotionally and mentally well.

Yet we continue to drive limited ideas of what it means to be a man into our boys – some of whom have themselves been traumatised, neglected, or abused sexually, emotionally, and physically.

Safe spaces for these boys to talk have been the rare exception and not the rule. Instead, we have told them to harden up, that crying is for girls. We have been grooming boys to behave in a stoic way, because an outdated model of westernised hyper-masculinity is what is collectively acceptable.

But boys who are pushed into a tiny box of what masculinity means become men that eventually explode.

They explode with violence against themselves, and they explode with violence against others, even those they claim they love, like their own partners and children.

What will it take to change?

We on many levels accept this, because any non-acceptance would require a deeper and more thoughtful look into how we all got here and what we collectively need to do to bring about actual change.

It would require a societal shift where we become trauma-informed and prioritise wellbeing, including for those who have typically been unable to access it.

We must ask ourselves what we can each do to create a community like this.

We should ask at what point do our elected leaders stop funding a broken, punitive prison system that was never designed to rehabilitate anyone, but instead traumatises them further so they leave worse than when they arrived.

We currently leave men’s healing up to the women they are in relationships with, purely because we won’t offer any real route to accessible rehabilitation that resonates.

Often, these men have no one else but her. And the pain that he carries winds up hurting her or even killing her. Yet collectively we carry on doing the same thing, hoping to miraculously achieve better outcomes.

Violence begets only violence until the pain at the root of that violence is witnessed, acknowledged, and healed.

Yes, this would take time, strategy, and significant resource.

But what we lack the courage to change now will simply persist in being passed on within our families, communities, and society.

Sarah Brown MNZM is the co-founder of She Is Not Your Rehab, a global anti-violence movement created to address and dismantle cycles of intergenerational trauma, violence and abuse by promoting safe relationships and providing accessible tools and support for individuals and communities.