There’s an old saying in New Zealand: whenever the All Blacks lose be prepared for a spike in domestic violence.
There’ll be many a family on tenterhooks this weekend as New Zealand meets Australia in the 2015 Rugby World Cup final.
New Zealand is often slammed for having a culture of brutality, but it now has the highest reported rate of intimate partner violence in the developed world.
Police undertook more than 100,000 investigations into domestic abuse last year. In 2013 children were present at 63 per cent of the callouts police attended.
Yet, it’s estimated that 90 per cent of family violence goes unreported…
The Tony Veitch saga last week was a case in point. If you missed it let me avail you of the short version.
The sports commentator decided to post a moronic comment during the All Blacks vs France match saying that he “didn’t get” the difference between “a punch” and “a fist to the face”.
I say “moronic” because, unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’d know that Veitch was convicted in 2009 of injuring his former partner with reckless disregard after pleading guilty. In fact, he broke her back.
So while his online tittering on Facebook may simply have been a poor choice of words, he was inundated with messages from all and sundry about what an awful human being he is. Hard to disagree…source
It’s not hard to see the association between New Zealand’s obsession with rugby and its domestic violence problem.
Want an example? These are some of the insults that were hurled at women who took offence at Veitch’s comments.
Veitch’s “army” of male supporters on Facebook…
“told the female commenters just what they could do with themselves. Their ‘advice’ involved dildos, slur after slur about their physical appearance, and that they just needed a few uppercuts to the head.
At no stage, that I’m aware of, did Veitch ask his band of merry men to back off. Silence. A fairly stock-standard response to the whole awful business of the prolific beating of women in this country…”
And this is the country people emigrate to looking for an improved quality of life, somewhere for their children to grow up strong and free? Not even close. Don’t even go there. You want to be part of society that allows this to go on?
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All articles tagged Violence Against Women
E2NZ.org 
I work in support/social service, and can tell you, the government doesn’t care for anything but results. Results are only generated AFTER the woman/child is beaten/dead. THEN they MIGHT give us the funding needed.
What the hell is that? Here’s the thing, there’s no system in place to really prevent anything. Govt don’t care based on IF, so essentially all we can do is clean up the mess. Their logic is that no matter what a situation looks like, as long as nothing bad has happened, it may never happen, so why bother? Why fund anything based on IF? And this is even when the IF is pretty much a certainty that something horrible is going happen. The ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
There’s also the matter of higher ups messing with statistics which puts kids in danger. Police and schools do it too.
I am on the other side of the world right now, but I am still shuddering as I know this to be true. How many of you have seen the film “Top of the Lake” by Jane Campion. All the brutality is revealed in its gory glory in the film set near Queenstown.
What is frequently missed here is that domestic violence perpetrators are NOT exclusively men. Many Kiwi girls and women are violent as well. However, when police are called to a domestic violence incident, they almost ALWAYS label the man as the perpetrator, even if there is blatant evidence that this is not the case.
I know of many guys who have been openly attacked by their wives and girlfriends. Most of them refuse to fight back,knowing that if they do they face possible imprisonment, and they won’t talk about it, because they will get laughed at by men and women alike. There is nowhere for these men to go either, as there are no domestic violence shelters for men at all.
A guy I know is a good example of this. Brought up in a home with a violent mother, he then was involved in 6 romantic relationships, 4 of which were with women who turned out to be physically violent (and all of which were emotionally abusive). In his final relationship his girlfriend, who he was living with, attacked him in front of his own daughter. He took his child and left, but due to a TOTAL lack of shelters, and after having been isolated from all friends and family by the woman involved he was forced to return. He did get out in the end, after getting help from one of his non-violent ex-girlfriends, but these days he refuses to become involved with women at all, and has been single for nearly 10 years.
Domestic violence is by no means a gender specific crime. Women are not always the victims, and men are not always the perpetrators. Female violence against men is a silent cancer in New Zealand that NONE want to talk about. New Zealand may top the OECD table for domestic violence, but how much of this is in truth perpetrated by women?
New Zealand is a violent place, and BOTH genders are both guilty of it, and suffer at the hands of perpetrators. But, if you are a THUG, New Zealand is a great place to be, irrespective of what gender you are.
Just wanted to put something “official” here, since people might write off what you say as “oh, you’re just bitter”
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/8944707/Legal-gap-for-battered-spouses-who-kill
(Note: when they talk about “battered spouses who kill … they’re talking about women, not men.
Because men who murder … are murderers,
and
Women who murder … are abused.
(Tell that to the mother of the man who is killed)
Moves to push for a law change allowing battered wives who kill their husbands in cold blood to plead self-defence are being considered by a government committee.
The Family Violence Deaths Review Committee says New Zealand is out of step with other countries in not offering at least a partial defence for women who kill their husbands after years of abuse.
The defence can be used when the killing is an immedite retaliation but not when the killing is premeditated.
The original suggestion was to introduce a partial self-defence for family violence victims who kill, but not during an immediate assault, and modifying the self-defence test so they can use it.
It could also aid children responding to severe abuse of themselves or other family members.
It would partly be in response to the decision to remove the partial defence of provocation after the public outcry following convicted murderer Clayton Weatherston’s failed attempt to use it as a defence in his 2009 trial for killing Sophie Elliott.
Commen by met: LOTS of relationship workshops in New Zealand, about how girls should not be in Sophie Elliott’s situation …
not many on how to avoid being a battered man (and I’m speaking as someone who was assaulted by Ms. Variava who worked for the domestic violence organisation Shakti / Disha in New Zealand)
For example, in 2010, Queensland woman Susan Falls was acquitted of murder on self-defence grounds after crushing sleeping pills in her husband’s dinner of chilli prawns, shooting him while he slept and disposing of the body.
From globalcomment.nett: “Falls paid a friend, Anthony Cummings-Creed $5,000 to buy a 22.calibre pistol with silencer on the black market.”
and “On May 26, 2006 while her husband Rodney Falls was drinking at his pub, she made him a dish of curried prawns for his dinner, knowing that their children would not eat any of the dish. Falls crushed up a number of sleeping tablets and laced the prawns with the mixture, assuming that the curry would mask the taste of the sleeping tablets.
Following the meal, her husband became drowsy and fell asleep in his recliner.”
and
“Falls walked up to her husband, and in front of her two girls, placed the pistol against his temple and fired.”
This is also seen very clearly in the laws of New Zealand. For example, there is the Man Assault’s Women law, but no equivalent going the other way. This means that women assaulting men is hidden in the statistics as a general assault. It is also seen with the laws protecting people against rape. In New Zealand, there isn’t even a law to prosecute women who rape. That’s right, in New Zealand, rape is NOT AGAINST THE LAW, provided it is perpetrated by a woman. Even if a woman is prosecuted in New Zealand, she will usually face a potential prison sentence one third the length of a man who commits the equivalent crime.
The situation is made even more obvious with campaigns such as White Ribbon, which specially raises funds and promotes awareness of violence specifically against women, and campaigns raising funds of female specific types of cancer, even though these already receive 600% of the funding of male specific cancers.
In domestic violence, it is only female shelters that exist, and men are regularly demonised, despite a number of legitimate studies indicating that domestic violence is not a gender specific crime. (The studies done by organisations such as Women’s Refuge often have their results manipulated to gain funding, and should be treated with great caution.) The fact that 75% of child deaths are at the hands of women is also completely ignored.
The question that must be asked is “Why are all the areas where focus and help is needed so gender specific, with men ALWAYS presented as the perpetrators, and women ALWAYS presented as the victims, when this is simply not true?” Shouldn’t anyone who rapes, or comments violence be punished equally before the law, and shouldn’t victims have the same level of protection and support not matter what their gender? Shouldn’t everyone enjoy the same level of medical assistance? Why do gender specific laws even exist? Isn’t that in itself a sign of government sponsored discrimination?
There is at least one lecturer in a university in New Zealand whose tenure depends on demonising men.
Mr. “scorpio” has of course, refused to accept a reality that both genders have the ability to become violent … but, as Upton Sinclair says “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I full agree with this. I’ve seen women missing fingers….over domestic violence here. I asked one about it and she said…”it’s ok, what I did to him was worse”. I stopped asking questions.