Thin line of defence

descent who have been killed by their partners or expartners in New Zealand in the past 15 years.

The Homicide Report, a Stuff data analysis project, found half of all women killed in New Zealand are beaten, stabbed, or shot to death by their partners or former partners.

Police do not routinely record the ethnicity of victims. Still, an analysis of the database is telling. After European and

Ma¯ ori, South Asian and Fijianindian women are the third most likely to die at the hands of partners or ex-partners. This likelihood is almost twice that of Pacific Island women.

These deaths are typically extremely violent. There is a term used by the Family Violence Death Review Committee, known as overkill: when the force used is much more than is needed to cause death. This characterises about half of intimate partner violence deaths in New Zealand.

But among the murder cases of ethnic minority women analysed by Stuff, the majority fell into this category.

Keshni Naicker, 28, was stabbed to death on a street in Christchurch by her ex-husband. Three people tried to help her.

Aucklander Gurpreet Kaur, 22, was pregnant when she was murdered in a car by her partner when she tried to leave him in April 2016.

A year previously, Parmita Rani, 22, was stabbed to death by her husband at a tertiary institution in Queen St, Auckland, after he calmly waited for her to finish an exam. He also attempted to kill the man he believed Rani had left him for.

While murders like that of

Sophie Elliott and Grace Millane have received nationwide – and even global – media coverage, those of many of the victims named above have passed with barely a mention.

Those who work in ethnic minority communities say this is due to a racist undercurrent that assigns a lesser value to these women’s lives.

‘‘We’re the wrong kind of brown,’’ says Sucharita Varma, from Sahaayta Counselling and Social Services in Manukau, South Auckland.

‘‘Just look at the horrific murders that have happened, and how they’ve happened. Our women are massively overrepresented . . . we see a lot of our community struggling, and it’s hard to target services to them.’’

Dr Sripriya Somasekhar, who wrote her PHD on Indian women and domestic violence in New Zealand and consults with police on ethnic family violence, puts it another way.

‘‘As a country, I’ve noticed that we wait for the problem to get really big before we try and address it. We wait to see people die, people suffer . . . before we even think about it.

‘‘Some of these women had been through years and years of abuse with no-one to talk to or support them . . .

‘‘Yes, it does take time to sort this out, but do you know what? We could prevent all these women from being killed, so I think it’s worth it.’’

Six years ago in Wellington, two migrant women were murdered by their ex-partners in a year.