White Ribbon New Zealand

News from the Joint Venture Te Puna Aonui

We are delighted to share news from the Joint Venture about developments in the violence prevention sector.

The first annual Te Aorerekura hui took place in July and key themes this year included addressing equities, Tangata Whenua leadership, activating the power of communities, working together and strengthening relationships, and working toward a shared pathway.

MSD has significantly improved the online help available for people affected by family violence, including a new website to support behaviour change for users of violence. The online tools are intended to make it easier for people to access help, understand whether their relationship is healthy, and Ruth achieve behaviour change. The redeveloped Are you okay? website now provides 24/7 telephone and online web chat help for victims and survivors of family violence and those supporting them to be safe. They have also added  new tools including a check it out quiz for people who are concerned about their relationship and a service finder  tool which will be used on other websites to make access to services easier. MSD has also launched a new website In Your Hands for people who use violence.

This month new Firearms Prohibition Orders will come into effect from 16 November. The purpose of these court orders is to protect the public from harm by prohibiting ‘high-risk’ offenders from accessing, being around, or using firearms or other restricted with them such as pistols or airguns.

The children’s Flexi fund as a Police – Oranga Tamariki initiative that was launched in December 2020 that has now provided additional support for nearly 1500 children affected by family harm. More information about the fund, including the application form, can be found here.

It’s great to see elements of the Action Plan announced last year are beginning to appear. We hope you will be able to make good use of these new resources.

Te Puna Aonui brings 10 government agencies together to align whole-of-government strategy, policy and investment to eliminate family violence and sexual violence.

* Te Puna Aonui includes:
Ara Poutama Department of Corrections
Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga Ministry of Education
Manatū Hauora Ministry of Health
Te Tāhū or te Ture Ministry of Justice
Te Manatū Whakahiato Ora Ministry of Social Development – Ngā Pirihimana o Aotearoa New Zealand Police
Oranga Tamariki Ministry for Children
Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission
Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Māori Development
Te Kaporeihana Āwhina Hunga Whare ACC

New White Ribbon ambassador a Presbyterian Church minister who brings Pasefika woman’s perspective

New Ambassador Hana Popea is a Presbyterian Church minister who aims to create a church support network to help prevent and stop violence towards women and children.

The Reverend Hana Popea has been appointed a White Ribbon ambassador for the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, and an Ambassador by White Ribbon NZ. The Presbyterian Church has a long-time commitment to supporting White Ribbon.

Hana brings a Pasefika perspective to issues of family violence in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Born in Samoa, she studied at Samoa College. She has a Bachelor of Theology and Post Graduate Diploma of Ministry from University of Otago. She was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 2005 and has been in parish ministry for 17 years.  Hana has been minister at St Ninian’s Uniting Church in Karori, Wellington, since 2016.  She is married to David Dell.

Passionate about children and families’ ministry, Hana’s work with White Ribbon will be informed by her interest in family violence prevention and her ongoing study and work with children and youth around resilience. This important part of her ministry is informed by her work as a minister, her experiences as a Pasefika woman, and as a mother raising a young man.

Her experiences have made her realise that there’s a big gap between listening and actively hearing the silent suffering of women and children who experience violence and abuse within our society.

She says that churches have an important role to play in closing this gap. “We have many people in our churches who are already working and volunteering with organisations in their communities to prevent violence towards women and children. The challenge is to connect them with each other, with other churches, cultures and with White Ribbon, so they can access training and resources to share.”

Hana says her mission for the kaupapa of White Ribbon is to help others to find their voice, to break the cycle of abusive behaviour, to create an open talanoa process and to facilitate educational programmes towards healing, caring, and the restoration of healthy relationships.

She dreams of helping to make New Zealand a place where healthy relationships thrive, positive attitudes are empowered, and loving and safe environments are the daily experience for all women and children.

Will Smith’s poor role modeling affirms use of violence

It’s not often you’ll get to see the Oscar Winner for Best Actor hit another man without a director yelling ‘cut’ afterwards.

What we witnessed was outdated male masculinity.

Those attitudes that Will Smith let rise to the surface in an unscripted moment, are why we need a reset, not with Hollywood elite, but with men. Too often we are taught as boys that we should ‘harden up’, that we need to be ‘tough’, that ‘boys don’t cry’ and too often we think the way to deal with issues is through anger and violence.

Those messages over time, and reinforced through media, help to put men in what we sometimes refer to as the ‘man box’. That’s the expectations that men must always appear dominant, tough and in charge. It’s a limitation that’s prescriptive and restrictive, where different behaviours are dismissed as being ‘not manly’. Worryingly, last year’s Gender Equality survey, run here in Aotearoa New Zealand with 1,250 participants, shows that 18% of participants (and 23% of men) agreed that showing physical or emotional weakness makes a man less of man, and 17% (21% of men) agreed that hitting out is an understandable response for a man when his wife or girlfriend tries to end a relationship. You can watch a video discussing those attitudes here.

Often a boy and a man will believe he needs to appear tough and in-control in front of other men. This is from a fear, real or not, that they’ll reject him, possibly violently, if he doesn’t fit in. Being told to ‘Man Up’ is to be reminded to get back into The Man Box.

We know that suppressing individual identities and diverse emotional responses is stressful. It’s also unhealthy as men who limit themselves by having to appear as tough and uncompromising often avoid asking for help when they most need it.

Believing in the rigid rules of masculinity are 20x more likely to predict committing violence, than any other demographic factors such as ethnicity, age or income.

Conversely, men who break out of The Man Box and choose their own masculine identity report that they’re less stressed, more satisfied with life and have happier relationships.

Will Smith’s actions provide us with an opportunity for a re-think about healthy masculinity. Where we reject the unhelpful stereotypes and unspoken rules about what it is to be a boy or man and replace them with being kind, empathetic and finding peaceful resolutions to problems.

Healthy masculinity is also about boys and men being confident in who they are without feeling pressure to be a certain type of boy/man. Boys and men can still be brave, and have muscles, be assertive, tough, love rugby, enjoy time with other men and boys, enjoy a ‘pint’ with the lads etc. But boys and men should also be free to express sad emotions, enjoy cooking, dancing, gardening and anything else that does not fit into gender stereotypes.

Healthy masculinity is treating everyone with respect and rejecting the need to use violence. In New Zealand one in three women are assaulted by their partner or ex-partner in their lifetime, so there’s a real need to take action now.

To change attitudes and behaviour is always possible. In Aotearoa we achieved that with seatbelts (if you’re old enough to remember). But even with something as straight forward as that, it took a decade for people to stop thinking the government were interfering with their ‘rights’ and accept that seatbelts would save lives. Imagine how men feel when words like ‘toxic masculinity’ are thrown around. But the sad reality is, the outdated attitudes that help drive violence, whether it is men’s violence towards other men or men’s violence towards women, are ideas that need to be consigned to our past.

We need to create a ‘call-in-culture’ that speaks to the need for change and provides concrete steps for how we can create that change. The alternative is that once in a decade we will talk about this issue when the Hollywood elite behave badly or worse, when the next fatality occurs that is driven by outdated masculinity.

Rob McCann
White Ribbon Manager

Compulsory Consent Education Petition

Stereotypes and intimate partner violence

White Ribbon challenges outdated ideas about masculinity

White Ribbon’s Researcher Dr Kris Taylor writes:

There are pervasive stereotypes around intimate partner violence, one of the most misleading of which is that the majority of men who commit such crimes fall within a specific, and limited demographic: minority men from disadvantaged backgrounds who have regular contact with police. However, recent Australian research published last month challenges these assumptions, showing clearly the ways that intimate partner violence, and its sometimes fatal consequences, span across social strata. The “Pathways to intimate partner homicide” project has shed some new light on the profile of men who kill their female partners. Using data spanning 2007 to 2018 (totalling 199 incidents), the researchers compiled data taken from judges’ sentencing remarks, coronial findings from the National Coronial Information System, as well as information sourced from the National Homicide Monitoring Program.

In their findings, the authors point out that one third of the men who killed their female partners are perceived as “functional and successful in public-facing domains of their life, both prior to and after starting their relationship with the victim”. They describe the ways that men in this group hold consistent employment in well-regarded industries (e.g. small business owners, geologist, real estate agents), are described as upstanding members of their local communities, and had minimal contact with the criminal justice system prior to killing their partner. Most were in long-term relationships with the women that they killed.

However, within this sizable group of offenders, which made up 33% of cases, patterns of control and possessiveness were prevalent. The offender would belittle their partner, restrict their partner’s contact and communication with others, and would accuse their partner of being unfaithful. Prior to the crime, the offenders were described as being jealous, controlling, and emotionally abusive. These behaviours would escalate when offenders felt that they were losing control of the victim, which in turn would lead to extreme forms of lethal violence as a means of establishing ultimate control. Crucially, across all of the 199 incidents analysed, the authors note recurrent themes that appeared to play a role in committing intimate partner homicide: “the emotional, mental and physical health of offenders; traumatic experiences among offenders; pre- and post-migration experiences of victims and offenders; separation; and hegemonic masculinities and traditional gender norms”.

This last point is particularly relevant for the work of White Ribbon. There was consistent evidence that the motivation to kill a female partner was associated with a perceived violation of gendered norms, which in turn challenged the offender’s self-perceived masculinity. Importantly, as the researchers note “adherence to traditional gender norms is more likely when the individual has witnessed and been the target of family violence during their childhood”. And we must understand that these beliefs about masculinity are not only held by these men, but are reinforced through social norms and expectations around masculinity. Worryingly, last year’s Gender Equality survey, run here in Aotearoa New Zealand with 1,250 participants, shows that 18% of participants (and 23% of men) agreed that showing physical or emotional weakness makes a man less of man, and 17% (21% of men) agreed that hitting out is an understandable response for a man when his wife or girlfriend tries to end a relationship.

In our work to end violence against others, we must now work towards challenging both men’s and society’s adherence to rigid beliefs around masculinity. Research consistently shows that men who condone violence and endorse traditional gender norms are more likely to be abusive towards their intimate partners. Moreover, men who witness intimate partner violence as children have been shown to be more likely to endorse rigid masculine stereotypes, and to hold strong views about men’s role in a relationship. And as the findings of the Pathways to intimate partner homicide project suggests, middle-class men with public facing roles, who are seen as upstanding in their communities, and who do not fit a limited stereotype of what an abuser might ‘look like’, are not immune from pervasive beliefs around masculinity that can lead to control, jealousy, violence, and homicide.

https://www.anrows.org.au/publication/the-pathways-to-intimate-partner-homicide-project-key-stages-and-events-in-male-perpetrated-intimate-partner-homicide-in-australia/

https://www.anrows.org.au/resources/pathways-to-intimate-partner-homicide/

Gender Attitudes Survey

Help to end violence and sexual violence

Youth Ambassador Leadership Programme

If you’re a senior student and want to take action to prevent violence and sexual violence, then this online workshop is for you and you can register here. Contact your principal and ask if your school can take part.

The Youth Ambassador Leadership Programme (YALP) is being held online on Friday 27th of May from 12 noon to 3:00pm and aims to help you understand the drivers behind family violence, how that plays out in real life, societal pressures that create unhelpful masculinity and behaviour, and finally how to take and inspire action in your own schools.

This is a free three hour workshop featuring four terrific presenters telling their stories and sharing their experiences to help you take action in your community.

Speakers include:

Richie Hardcore, educator, keynote speaker and activist, working in violence prevention, masculinities, mental health and wellness.

Richie is also a retired multiple New Zealand Muay Thai champion, and now works as a coach and personal trainer, having helped some of New Zealand’s most successful fighters achieve their goals. With a fighting career that spanned more than 20 years, he was paid to punch people in the face. These days, that energy is channelled towards Richie’s big mission – to help make the world better by supporting people to live their best lives. He’s spent time as a community worker in drug and alcohol harm reduction, is a campaigner against domestic and sexual violence, and a sexual consent educator. Richie is passionate about helping to overturn this country’s mental health statistics. An excellent public speaker, he’s also an experienced radio host and MC, using his skills to help educate, inspire and challenge.

Eteuati Ete, (formerly of the Laughing Samoans), White Ribbon Ambassador

Eteuati Ete is a comedian, actor, writer and theatre producer who has decided to use his profile and influence particularly amongst Maori and Pasefika to raise awareness of family harm by sharing his own story of family violence as a victim and a perpetrator. He and his wife Mele Wendt have over the last few years been sharing their lived experience of family violence, as presenters in the Nga Vaka Family Violence programme. They believe that “violence thrives in silence” and by speaking out they will encourage and embolden victims to find their own voice. They also provide practical advice on how they were able to eliminate the violence in their marriage. While Ete has been an actor for almost forty years who’s appeared in film, tv and theatre, having been one of the first Pasefika people to attend the New Zealand Drama School, he’s perhaps best known as one half of the highly successful Laughing Samoans comedy duo.

Mele Wendt MNZM, White Ribbon Ambassador

Mele Wendt has a past lived experience of family harm which she and her husband, Eteuati Ete, publicly speak about. Having survived a turbulent period over 20 years ago, they share the particular factors that enabled their marriage to become violence-free and to thrive. Professionally, Mele worked for 24 years in education – first as a secondary school teacher and then at Victoria University of Wellington as the founding Pacific Liaison Officer and the manager of the domestic student recruitment office. She then served ten years as the Executive Director of Fulbright New Zealand. In the past few years Mele has been serving on a number of boards (including Chair of the Pasifika Education Centre in Auckland) and providing consultancies in several areas. Mele is involved in a number of women’s organisations and Pacific community groups, including P.A.C.I.F.I.C.A., the national organisation for Pacific women. She is a strong advocate for and mentor to women and girls, especially in the Pacific community. Mele is Samoan and pakeha/palagi, and has lived in Wellington for over 30 years. With four grown children, she and Ete are doting grandparents of three grandchildren and recently Mele was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to governance, the Pacific community and women.

Rob McCann, White Ribbon Manager

Graduating from Otago University with a double degree majoring in law and drama, Rob has worked for both community organisations and commercial businesses as a manager, coordinator and leader and currently manages the White Ribbon anti-violence campaign. He’s also a first time councillor at the Kapiti Coast District Council. Rob has extensive experience as a speaker and presenter.

David Cournane, Aotea College Assistant Principal and White Ribbon Ambassador

David will run the breakout sessions and manage the final presentation which brings together the ideas from the workshop about what your school can undertake to prevent violence and sexual violence. David is a White Ribbon Ambassador and educator, who has been instrumental in bringing together the Youth Ambassador Leadership Programme in Aotearoa.

* Breakout sessions occur after each session.

Pre COVID, 30 schools and 240 students and staff attended the first full-day workshop with students reporting the event was ‘very engaging’, ‘should continue each year’, that they ‘thoroughly enjoyed the experience’, ‘would definitely attend in the future’ and ‘really enjoyed the day and learned a lot from it’.

• 86% felt the speakers helped them understand the causes of family violence
• 91% felt speakers helped them understand what a healthy relationship looks like
• 69% strongly agreed the speakers were engaging with a further 31% agreeing
• The workshop at the end of the day helped me come up with ideas of how to create change in my school or community (25% strongly agreed, 60% agreed, 13% neither agreed nor disagreed, and 2% disagreed).

All participants receive a PDF workbook and access to resources to help their schools raise awareness and take action. REGISTER HERE.

Shining A Light on White Ribbon Day

Today on Parliament steps, White Ribbon was represented by White Ribbon Ambassadors: Air Marshal Kevin Short, Police Commissioner Andrew Coster, Judge Peter Boshier, Hannah Dorey, Mark Shepherd and White Ribbon Riders.

White Ribbon Patron, Judge Boshier spoke of the need for change, Commissioner Coster spoke about the Stories of Change that his own officers shared to inspire others, Air Marshal Kevin Short talked about the need to create a Call-In Culture to inspire real change.

Then White Ribbon Ambassador Hannah Dorey shared her ‘story of change’. It was a humbling moment to hear something so personal and so powerful, on the steps of our lawmakers and in front of the Ministers for Family and Sexual Violence Prevention, Corrections, Justice and Women along with MPs from across all of Parliament. Here is that speech:

White Ribbon Speech
25th November 2021

Kia ora everyone,

I’ve always seen myself as a strong person, ever since I was a kid I was determined to run the fastest and prove my strength to every person in the room. By the end of primary school I gained my junior black belt in Rhee Tae Kwon Do and knew at that moment that I could take on anything. Until the nights came where I remembered I was trapped in an unsafe house that was supposed to be a home. Until the first time a boy kissed me when I didn’t want him to. Until I turned eighteen, and was groped and touched every Saturday night in town.

So I stopped wearing skirts, and dresses, and started inspecting the colour of my drink and holding my hand over the brim of my glass. The first time I was sexually assaulted I didn’t know it was wrong, you see I had been drinking and the next morning I convinced myself that I had somehow asked for it. But there were parts I didn’t remember, moments I wasn’t sure happened. So how could I claim anything? After all, it really could have been my fault.

The second time I was sexually assaulted my entire body felt broken, numb. As much as I willed myself to move, I couldn’t. Those memories, will forever visit me in my nightmares. Those moments are what make me jump when someone touches my arm, they’re what make me hold my keys between my finger and thumb when I walk home at night. They remind me of the young kid that was so certain they could take on anyone and anything. That they would never be in danger.

Healing isn’t linear, there’s always going to be setbacks, days and nights when you feel trapped in your own skin. I am not healed, when a part of you is taken like that, it feels impossible to heal. But I realised that I didn’t want to hate myself for someone else’s action. So I decided to speak, to shine a light on what happens behind closed doors. That’s when I discovered White Ribbon had the same goals as me. I first found them in a school hall where I listened to stories of change, stories that made me believe I could heal, stories that made me believe we could change.

So I speak to you now, whoever is listening; my story is not uncommon, my story is one of millions. And although I am healing there are ways to prevent this. We must teach one and other what respect means, we must remind our friends and family that consent is a human right. We must have these conversations, even if they are hard, even if they can be uncomfortable at times.  We must try, because if we continue to keep our secrets hidden in the crevices of our keys, or the bottom of our drinks then we will never know change.

It takes all of us, and the goal of changing unhealthy attitudes is daunting to me. Some days, I have no hope that we can do it. But it’s days like this that remind me we can, our attitudes must learn to grow with us.

So I ask you, a simple favour; start that conversation, teach, listen and learn. I am not ashamed of myself the way I used to be, instead I plan to keep talking, to be the voice of change and speak as loudly as I can to get our society’s attention. It doesn’t seem like much, I know, but a conversation can very easily change someone’s life.

Kia Ora
Hannah

The White Ribbon Riders then took central stage, still with tears in their eyes to share their journey, and the need to ask for help, especially when victims become perpetrators. Mark Shepard then handed those Stories of Change to Minister Davidson, who spoke eloquently about what these stories and Hannah’s personal account meant to her. The Minister then spoke about the work across all of government and the strategy that she will launch in just a few weeks. The event was then closed by the Minister of Justice who thanked all the participants and the MPs with a special mention for the work the Riders, Hannah and all the other anti-violence advocates undertake.

You can watch the Facebook Live Stream here, the event begins at 8mins in. https://www.facebook.com/whiteribbonnz/videos/385370386703236

You can watch Hannah talking about the issue of consent below.

Special credit to Damon Keen for many of these photos.