New Report on the Prevention of Violence Against Women and Children Released

Creating a Culture of Non-Violence: The Report from the New Zealand Parliamentarians’ Group on Population and Development was launched today.

The report looks at the Aotearoa New Zealand situation, and is based on the findings and recommendations from the Open Hearing into the Prevention of Violence Against Women and Children held in Wellington earlier this year.

The report provides useful and recent information from the key government agencies and non-governmental organisations working to address violence against women and children in New Zealand, in particular family violence.

Recommendations from the NZPPD are outlined at the end of the report along with an Action Plan to guide Members of Parliament. The recommendations are as follows:
• “We endorse the establishment of the Ministerial Committee on Family Violence (involving key Ministers) and the Taskforce on Ministerial Violence (involving key government chief executives and NGOs). We are confident that these will provide the leadership that is needed.
• Sustainable approaches to changing societal attitudes to violence need to be population focussed, and to be well researched and evidence based.
• The gender perspective of family violence (due to the disproportionate impact of partner violence on women) must not be lost. This includes the socio-economic impacts on women and children leaving violent relationships.
• Community ownership of programmes is essential to ensure that nationwide strategies are sufficiently flexible to allow innovation and cultural relevance, ensuring that local solutions are accessible, effective and practical. To ensure that models of intervention are effective, their development and design will require engagement with men and boys, and with specific groups in the community such as Maori, Pacific, refugees and migrants.
• We support the proposal to further review the effectiveness of the protection order regime instituted by the Domestic Violence Act 1995 and recommend that the review involve key community agencies working on the ground.
• Policy development should build on existing programmes and strategies, rather than developing new strategies. Policy development and funding programmes should be researched and evidence-based, and should not be ‘siloed’. Accessible programmes for parents must be available to all communities.
• Cross sectoral collaboration and coordination requires resourcing of the coordinationfunction. This is essential to ensure that the agencies do not have to divert resources from their core activities.
• The workforce development needs of the voluntary and community sector must be resourced separately from their contracts for services. Best practice models that apply across the public and private sector are able to be facilitated in this way. Knowledge at the community level must be regarded by government as a valuable resource and this may require funding mechanisms for sharing that knowledge.
• A consistent model for developing, funding, monitoring and auditing services is recommended. The competitive tendering process fragments services and destroys relationships. Inter-sectoral collaboration and sharing of information in an environment of trust is paramount to achieving successful outcomes for women and children.
It is important to gather statistical information about the incidence of violence against women and children. The Family Violence Clearinghouse should be an excellent base for collating data on violence and accessing information about current research and intervention programmes. It is also important that we learn the lessons from individual cases, particularly when they result in the death of a woman or child. We strongly support the proposed Family Violence Death Review Teams proposal currently being scoped by the Ministry of Justice. Lessons learned will be able to be fed back into the policy development process, which must be continuous to be effective.
• We are also aware that violence against women and violence against children are inextricably linked, therefore it is important to identify potential child abuse when partner abuse is identified and to address the impacts on children of partner violence - the young witnesses are victims too” (p27).
• The report will be sent to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs with the recommendation that it is used for the CEDAW report due in 2006.

Creating a Culture of Non-Violence: The Report from the New Zealand Parliamentarians’ Group on Population and Development ‘Open Hearing into the Prevention of Violence Against Women and Children’. (2005). NZPPD: Wellington.

Available now from http://www.fpaid.org.nz/Portals/6/NZPPD/NZPPD%20Resources/NZPPD%20Creati...