Breaking the cycle of violence

Revulsion, disgust, anger. Those are all emotions that should be stirred by reading some of the accounts contained in a report by Women’s Refuge and Family Planning, released yesterday. The sometimes sinister, sometimes brutal, invariably frightening accounts are contained in responses to a survey on the practice of reproductive coercion, a form of intimate partner violence where one partner, almost invariably a man, tries to undermine the reproductive autonomy of the other, through methods such as controlling access to contraceptives and abortions, sabotaging birth control, and pressuring the person to get pregnant.

The kinds of behaviour described, including a woman having an intrauterine device ripped out of her by her partner, and men sabotaging condoms with needles, fly in the face of our society’s definition as civilised.

Not all involve out and out violence, but all have one partner exercising control, preventing the other exercising their own choices. One incident, bizarrely, involved a man forbidding his partner from breastfeeding, and even kissing, their baby.

The report is yet another grim reminder of New Zealand’s utterly shameful record on domestic violence, as if we needed one.

Women’s Refuge has been involved in other surveys related to domestc violence. One, commissioned in 2011, established the co-existence of violence and cruelty to animals. It confirmed that threats of cruelty to animals were used as a means of control in family violence situations, as with situations of reproductive coercion.

Monday’s report is timely, coming just over a fortnight after Green MP Jan Logie, the undersecretary to the minister of justice (domestic and sexual violence issues), announced a new joint venture plan to tackle family and sexual violence.

That plan brings together 10 government agencies, ranging from Oranga Tamariki and the Ministry of Social Development, to Health, Justice and Police, and addresses a perception that one of the problems the country has faced in trying to rein in domestic violence has been a siloed approach by the various agencies tackling the issue of domestic violence.

‘‘. . . we need all of our government agencies to come together to make sure all their staff know how to respond to be able to give people the help they need when they ask for it,’’ Logie said, when announcing the plan in Gisborne on September 28.

Plainly, the most immediate concern in addressing the question of domestic violence is the victims, and the safety of the women and children caught up in it. In cases of reproductive coercion, that could extend to children whose birth is a result of the control exercised by fathers. The prospects for those children and their mothers appear particularly bleak and need urgent addressing.

But breaking the cycle of controlling behaviour is, in the longer term, the most important part of the response. In this regard, the value of a coordinated approach, in which agencies share information, looms large.

The release of this report should remind all involved of the urgency of their joint mission.

‘‘The report is yet another grim reminder of New Zealand’s utterly shameful record on domestic violence, as if we needed one.’’