A White Ribbon community event on November 30 at Memorial Park in Tauranga aims to change the conversation around family violence in New Zealand.

“Planting a seed is what I am hoping for this community event,” Tauranga Women’s Refuge multi-agency response coordinator Lyric Ratahi said.

The event will include a clothing swap, free haircuts, nappies, baby food, and spaces for breastfeeding mothers during the day.

“We have a whole bunch of different organisations there who have some ties into family violence in one way,” Ratahi said.

The event runs from 10am to 2pm on Saturday, November 30, and will balance an emotional, heavy day with face painting and a dunk tank.

“We’re talking about some really heavy stuff, and I want it to be normalised. That’s my goal,” Ratahi said.

Only a third of family violence episodes in New Zealand are reported to the police, as the majority of people in abusive relationships don’t reach out, according to the White Ribbon Factsheet on gender and family violence.

“I just wanted it to be an event where people can come and do the things. We will also have a safe space set up for tāne and wāhine at an external location ... should someone want to come in and want to kōrero and want support,” Ratahi said.

Women are four and a half times more likely to experience intimate partner or family violence than men. One in four women in New Zealand reported they have been a victim of an offence by a partner, according to the 2009 NZ Crime and Safety Survey.

“The majority of the things that we hear is just really scratching the surface,” Ratahi said.

Shaming men into action doesn’t work, Ratahi explains, as all it does is create a spiral of hopelessness and silence.

“We want them [men] to be encouraged to make positive changes in their life, and for them, that will look different from person to person depending on their family,” Ratahi said.

“Often, you will see or hear men talk about wanting to be different than what they experienced growing up.”

“It’s that old thing of ... you don’t know what you don’t know. And a lot of people were raised in violence.

”Wāhine are overrepresented in family violence statistics and media, where narratives often shift towards victim blaming and justifying violence against women, Tauranga Women’s Refuge multi-agency response coordinator Amber Randall said.

“It’s victim blaming because saying they might have once been on drugs automatically says ‘well, she put herself in the situation where she wasn’t the safest because she once used to take drugs.‘”

“Automatically, you’re blaming the victim,” Randall said.

Shining the spotlight on the behaviour of the abuser rather than on the person being assaulted is a change both Ratahi and Randall would like to see.

“Sometimes we miss the facts, and you end up being a personal issue, as opposed to a behavioural issue,” Ratahi said.

Randall believes colonisation played a part in the family violence witnessed by tangata whenua.

“If you go back into the past, the stories were always about how children and wāhine were always taonga [sacred] to Māori,” Randall said.

“It’s colonial, and it’s a pattern of systematic abuse.”

- SunLive