Thin line of defence
Young Auckland mother Arishma Chand was killed by a homicidal ex-partner two years ago. She is among the invisible victims of intimate partner violence in this country, writes Michelle Duff for The Homicide Report.
Rakesh Chand used to come home from work in the early hours to find 10-year-old daughter Arishma had heated up his roti for him. Father and daughter would sit in the dark, talking as he finished his curry.
Fourteen years later, Rakesh again arrived home in the middle of the night. There was no aromatic smell. There were no arms reaching up, no ‘‘Hi, Daddy.’’ There was only his daughter, lying on a patch of blood-soaked carpet, impossibly still; and his wife Aradhana by his side, her screams cutting through the night.
Arishma was 24, an early childhood teacher.
Aradhana can no longer work. Focusing is too difficult, and fear follows her out of the house. Arishma wasn’t only her daughter, but her best friend.
‘‘She was such a big-hearted person, she was a very bubbly girl who was loved by all. People just can’t believe what happened to her. Our whole life has been changed . . .I am still living in fear. We’re just living for her,’’ Aradhana says, nodding across her granddaughter.
It’s a Saturday in early spring, and Arishma’s little girl is wearing a Frozen dress and a pair of fluffy slippers. A corner of the lounge is dedicated to her toys, and she’s carrying a giant teddy bear to show the victim support worker on the couch.
Arishma’s daughter is now five. Rakesh works as a truck driver, to pay for their $500-a-week rental in Weymouth, Auckland. They could not stay in their previous house in Manurewa. It didn’t feel safe.
There are no physical signs of Arishma in the new house, no photographs. They are too upsetting for the young girl. She doesn’t know how her mother died, or even fully understand that she is not coming back.
The Chands moved to New Zealand from Fiji in 2016, to support Arishma, who was living in Auckland and was recently out of a relationship with her daughter’s father.
She was murdered in November 2017 by Rohit Singh, then 42, a former partner turned stalker who became obsessed with her.
In the months before ending the life of the woman he could not have, Singh texted and messaged her obsessively. He got a full-chest tattoo of her face.
He stabbed her, in a frenzied attack that left more than 20 wounds, including the fatal one in her groin.
The case took a year to get to trial, but the jury took only 45 minutes to find Singh guilty of murder, in November 2018. Three months later he was jailed for life, with a minimum nonparole period of 19 years.
That’s not where it ends. In July last year, he appeared in court again to appeal against his sentence. This was rejected in September, but seeing Singh in court and in headlines again has retraumatised the family.
The Chands do not know what they could have done to protect their daughter. They say they didn’t know the full extent of her relationship with Singh – everything they have heard has been Singh’s version, told in court, or from the police.
They urge other parents to speak to their children about their relationships, and act if anything seems amiss. ‘‘She didn’t share any of this with me,’’ Aradhana says. ‘‘She didn’t want to tell us and for us to be upset . . . If she would have told me something, I could have spoken up.’’
‘We could prevent these deaths’
You might never have heard of Arishma Chand. What about Ranjeeta Sharma? Titiksha Desai? Inayat Kausar? How about Parmita Rani, Gupreet Kaur, or Keshni Naicker?
These are just some of the women of South Asian or FijianIndian
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.’’
‘‘She didn’t share any of this with me. She didn’t want to tell us and for us to be upset . . .’’
Arishma Chand’s mother, Aradhana
‘The women are afraid’
Six years ago in Wellington, two migrant women were murdered by their ex-partners in a year.
Both Mei Fan and Sarwan Lata Singh had protection orders against their former partners. It did not make a difference.
Their brutal murders briefly shone a light on the struggles many ethnic minority families face in adapting to life in a new country, where the rules are different and support can be difficult to find – or non-existent. Shakti Wellington, an ethnic women’s refuge, was set up in response to these 2013 deaths.
But the spotlight soon moved on. Shila Nair, senior adviser for Shakti Wellington, says migrant women face culturally specific abuse, which was often normalised. This includes dowry abuse, as well as forced marriage, honour-based killings, and genital mutilation.
This violence is overwhelmingly against women, with the woman often blamed, Nair says. Even those who are familiar with the culture can find it difficult. When she began research for her PhD, Somasekhar, who is from India, found herself frozen out of Indian communities in New Zealand.
‘‘I thought ‘How hard can it be to start a conversation in the community?’ And the answer was ‘very hard’. None of the Indian leaders I spoke to wanted to accept it was a problem. Women were afraid.’’
She says migrant women already face multiple barriers to seeking help. Faith and community leaders often side with the perpetrator, trying to ‘‘smooth over’’ problems considered to be caused by the wife This can also be because these communities are targets of racism and abuse, and want to maintain a peaceful and ‘‘harmless’’ veneer.
‘‘If we go out to wider society and say ‘We have a big problem,’ that will feed into the stereotyping and racism we also face.’’
Somasekhar says the Government needs to target new migrants with information about the law and services when they arrive. ‘‘Many vulnerable women are isolated, so authorities need to be more proactive. The time when they come in and land and get to where they’re going is a small window and, after that, the doors close.
‘‘The extent of the abuse is horrific – all of the women I spoke to only left the relationship when there was a real threat to their lives. One was chased with a machete, and told the specific time when he was going to chop her into pieces.’’
Both Varma and Zoya Kara of Sahaayta told Stuff they knew of multiple times where community leaders had organised family meetings with a perpetrator and victim, despite a protection order being in place.
‘‘Not only will this not help, but they’re breaking the law,’’ Varma says. ‘‘It’s a very maledominated response . . . but we’re talking about men who come from a country where rape in marriage is not a criminal offence. That’s what we’re working with.’’
At times, Varma and Kara have been banned from various Auckland temples.
Stuff approached both the Wellington Indian Association and Auckland Indian Association for this article, but has not received a response.
Hope for the future
Some initiatives are making a difference.
In 2018, the
Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) provided $1.7 million over three years to expand intervention service Gandhi
Nivas, which works with perpetrators of domestic violence.
Initially set up as a service for South
Asian and Fijian
Indian men in 2014, Gandhi Nivas now has three facilities that cater for men of all ethnicities.
Varma was instrumental in helping to establish the first centre.
She says in the year before it was established, 55 per cent of police domestic violence order breaches were from South Asian men. That year, four of the 14 women killed in New Zealand were Indian.
But far from improving the situation, police safety orders were often inflaming perpetrators, who felt they were being unfairly persecuted for behaviour considered more acceptable in their home country.
‘‘These guys were sleeping out of community parks, they were going to the swimming pool for a shower, thinking, ‘She’s the one with the issues, I’m paying all the bills but I have to stay outside now?’,’’ Varma says.
‘‘When he comes back, he’s angry. Three months later there’s another argument, and this one turns physical.’’
They also found women were worried about their partners, and often felt guilty about them being forced to leave.
Gandhi Nivas offers intensive counselling, through Sahaayta, for both perpetrator and victim. Varma and her team know the cultural context and are able to work with the whole family, a solution that works far better than a mainstream programme.
‘‘In those ones, they’re sitting at the back thinking ‘I’m not connecting with this, but I have to come or I won’t get back to my family.’ They sit there for eight weeks, the orders get discharged, they go back home and nothing changes.’’
At the time of writing there had been 1285 perpetrators through the Otahuhu centre and a very low rate of reoffending, with only 16 known recidivists, Varma says.
Pressure has been mounting on police from ethnic groups such as the Islamic Women’s Council to collect the ethnicity data of victims, so as to target initiatives to stop violence.
Asked when and how this would be done, police national manager of Ma¯ ori, Pacific and ethnic services Mike McLean said police planned to begin asking victims to voluntarily self-report ethnicity.
‘‘This work involves changes to a significant number of IT systems, information datasets, and across multiple work groups. The project is still in its early stages and, as such, there is no timeframe available.’’