Fighting the Devil: Inside Violence in New Zealand
This story was originally published 20/10/2019
Violence, as an action and an expression, is more complicated than it seems.
People have blamed video games, rock music and action films but seem to forget that before all of those things there were: The Crusades, The Salem Witch Trials and the beatings and murders of women and the LGBT+ community.
We’re swimming in violence and it seems like we can’t get enough. In 2019 (and beyond) why is there a call, a compulsion, an always justifiable reason to commit violence against another person or an animal?
Is Violence in Our Nature?
Devon Polaschek, a Professor in the School of Psychology at Waikato University and Joint Director at the NZ Institute for Security and Crime Science Te Puna Haumara, has an interesting take on it.
“One point of view,” Polaschek tells me over the phone, “and this is the view of an international expert, whose work I have read quite a bit of, is that the most violent people in a community are actually toddlers.
“If you watch toddlers and small children,” Polaschek continues, “they hit each other over the head with things, they push each other, they do all sorts of stuff that would be major criminal acts if they were adults. By that argument, we all have the capacity to be violent and good socialisation actually takes that out of us and we learn other ways to achieve our goal.”
Shine, a family violence support organisation, is on the front line of what happens when socialisation fails and violent tendencies carry into adulthood.
Kieran Simmons, an in School Educator for Shine, focuses on prevention methods, including providing in school training and safe places for students to talk about violence and unpick where they get their ideas from and how they impact them and their relationships.
Simmons that one of the biggest challenges to socialisation is the one-two punch of an outwardly aggressive Kiwi culture that calls for young boys and men to ‘harden up’ and toxic-masculinity.
“We do see that, talking to younger boys and younger men [that masculinity] does come up in some of the attitudes they have.” Simmons says from a meeting room in Shine’s Auckland office.
“If I spoke generally about some of the schools I go to, and talking to the counsellors in those schools, violence is about one upmanship…[and] using violence to solve problems in relationships.”
You Made Me Like This
Socialisation works the opposite way too. You can be taught to be nonviolent as well as violent.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson from The Department of Corrections in New Zealand, which oversees the prison system, said that, “over 75 percent of the prison population have convictions for violence in their offending histories.”
According to Corrections, as of 30 June 2019, the total prison population in New Zealand was 19,938 people.
How people get socialised into violence is a complicated issue and can be a combination of normalised violence in the community — such as on the sports field, being the victim of violence or seeing violence used as a problem solving tool in relationships, in the vein of family violence.
“One route is that victims of abuse, severe forms of abuse, are common in backgrounds of severely violent people,” Polaschek says. “One of the things they learn is that the world is a place where people prey on each other so these people think its a dog-eat-dog world and if they’re not defending themselves, then there is someone that’s taking advantage of them.”
The most likely perpetrators of the kind of violence that Polaschek describes are usually young men who don’t have highly successful jobs or a lot of education, and so are more likely to try and prove themselves through fighting with each other as a means of earning their place in the social hierarchy.
This isn’t full the picture and in trying to fill in the blanks, Simmons takes it one step further highlighting New Zealand’s cultural emphasis on gender roles (especially how gender roles are changing as men are increasingly less seen as the providers and protectors of the household), masculinity and the intergenerational effects of colonisation.
He says that:
• One in two Māori women will experience sexual or physical violence in their lifetime.
• One in three European / Pakeha and Pasifika women will experience similar types of violence in either life time.
To drill down a little further, Simmons theorises that changing gender roles have a bigger impact than is fully understood and it results in men feeling uncertain about where they fit in the social structure. That uncertainty turns to frustration and that frustration can turn to violence.
“You see an extreme version of that in Once Were Warriors,” Polaschek says,”One of the disturbing things about Once Were Warriors is that the year after it came out, those of us working with violent people in prison and people with violent histories would say to us ‘that’s how I was brought up. That movie, that’s my life.’ I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that…If you hear that, it’s no great surprise that people end up being violent themselves.”
What further muddies the waters is that it socioeconomic status isn’t a dead ringer for whether or not someone is likely to use violence to get what they want. In higher socioeconomic households, one in four women report sexual or physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner in their lifetime.
It’s an epidemic that touches every part of society.
Welcome to the Epidemic
Chand Guthrie is a Family Violence Advocate at Shine, working alongside Kieran Simmons.
Guthrie works closely with the NZ Police and victims of family violence, providing crisis intervention and referrals. She sees the worst of New Zealand’s family violence epidemic and understands better than anyone the layers that make violence so complicated.
“These are complex issues because violence in itself is not the whole picture.” Guthrie says.
One of the biggest challenges with how we deal with violence in New Zealand, according to Guthrie, is that there’s a tendency to treat it as though it’s someone else’s problem. This antipathy and lack of involvement, as a society, has helped family violence in particular become an epidemic.
“Everyone knows someone that’s been beaten on or subject to some kind of abuse,” Guthrie says.
Unfortunately, another challenge is that the statistics on family violence aren’t definitive. Guthrie explains that the statistical blindside comes from higher socioeconomic levels.
“Anyone from a high socioeconomic situation will not report [family violence]. If a woman has a lawyer to hand, she will not report it. The only time we do here about it is when there’s a custody battle for the children and it’s been going on for two or three years and she has drained all of her resources and there’s no money left because it’s all gone to the lawyers.”
This resonates with Polaschek, who says that those with higher socioeconomic status often utilise violence against partners in different ways to those with a lower socioeconomic status.
“Concealment is more of an option when you’ve got more skills.” Polaschek says. “You can think more carefully about what you can do to make living difficult for someone else. You can create an environment in which the victim is not going to disclose the violence because of shame. You can create circumstances where she might not be believed. If it’s a woman, and it often is — not always but often — she won’t be believed because you set up her reputation among her peers as one that’s a bit crazy or crying wolf.”
There are different strategies that can be used to make someone’s life miserable including controlling income and preventing them from spending time with family and friends. These are among the worst cases of coercive and controlling family violence where physical violence can be replaced with a web of ways that a perpetrator can effectively gain full control over a person’s life.
More cohesive and manipulative strategies are employed by people with higher socioeconomic status because they feel they have more to lose — high powered jobs, assets, a reputation — than people with a lower socioeconomic status.
“We know that people use violence in the upper tiers [of society] but we don’t know much about them because it’s easy for them to hide what they do.” Polaschek says. “We believe that [family violence] is in all parts of our community but if you look at who is calling the police, that isn’t equally distributed across society. That means that we believe that people in higher socioeconomic environments…aren’t caught at the real rate.”
While it’s difficult, if not impossible, to target a single cause for violence, Guthrie, Simmons and Polaschek all agree that lack of healthy relationships is more than a common thread and is an underlying theme throughout our conversations.
The Softer the Skin, The Sharper the Teeth
Everyone I spoke to for this story agreed that one of the best ways to prevent violence is through education — teaching people how to communicate effectively, starting as young as possible, and socialising out those violent tendencies.
However, for the tens of thousands of people that are passed school age and haven’t outgrown those tendencies, this remains an urgent issue.
For those who are members of the prison population, Corrections says it helps by delivering “a range of rehabilitation programmes in prisons which address different offending types, including violent offending.”
These programmes are aimed at helping people, “change their offending behaviour and develop a lifestyle that helps and maintains these changes”, and are provided alongside specialist psychological treatment that’s prioritised for high risk offenders, including serious violent offenders.
There are two main types of programmes, according to the statement from Corrections:
The Special Treatment Unit Rehabilitation Programme for high risk offenders. The Corrections Spokesperson says that, “this is an intensive programme delivered by Corrections psychologists where prisoners actively learn the skills necessary to live without further offending, “and takes place during group-based treatment which is delivered in special units and has participants actively learning the skills to live without further offending and receive an individualised treatment plan.”
The second of the Corrections programmes is known as the Medium Intensity Rehabilitation Programme which Corrections says, “focuses on altering thoughts, attitudes and behaviour that led to offending, including violent propensity.”
Guthrie says that the complexity of the situation means that care needs to be holistic and not end as soon as someone is released from prison.
“When someone gets out of prison, there’s nowhere for them to go and there’s no support. They could have been rehabilitated but then they end up on the streets. They don’t have a house or a family or their children.”
“As a society,” Guthrie says,”we need to be informed and seek out how to support these people. You know, there are a lot of instances where the government is not doing enough and one thing for sure is that we don’t have a good justice system that is victim focused instead of offender focused.
“A lot of people will go back to their partners and within two or five years there would have been at least ten incidents reported and that person is going back and forth to the court and nothing is happening.”
In its statement, the Corrections Spokesperson said:
“While an offender is in prison, we do as much as we can to reduce the likelihood of them coming back to prison. We do this providing rehabilitation, education and employment opportunities that give offenders the skills and experiences they need to live crime-free. In 2017/2018 we spent around $200 million on rehabilitation and reintegration services.”
No one, it seems, has all the answers but what we can do, according Simmons, Guthrie and Polaschek, is make sure that as a society, we focus on educating people — whether young people or adults — to work towards effective prevention measures and, for those who are already in the justice system, ensure that care and support are not only victim focused but also end-to-end for perpetrators so that we can focus on continuous rehabilitation.
Violence in New Zealand remains an extremely complicated issue that doesn’t have a silver bullet solution. What we do know is that organisations like Shine are under pressure from the sheer volume of family violence cases and that changing how we think about and use violence as a society, and as communities, is a challenge that requires cooperation and collaboration from every part of society.
