Government seeks sense against violence
The sanctity of the private home cannot be used to cloak savagery within it.
New Zealanders don’t have much of a problem with the general idea of authorities wading protectively into abusive and unsafe homes.
But the practicalities of how to do this in time, and effectively, have confounded us.
Laws have been clumsily put together, or only patchily policed, or have languished under-used because the so often ground-down victims have lacked the confidence that it will actually help them.
And wide-eyed children, said to be present for nearly 80 percent of domestic violence, have become part of it. Those outside the walls look away. The United Nations ranks us at the bottom of the heap for intimate partner violence and our dead-child statistics are hideous.
The Government’s plan to remodel rules for how the state intervenes was released this week and it demands close scrutiny.
At least at first blush it seems a decent attempt to do good.
It entails more than 50 law changes and has a $130 million budget. That’s a figure that would quickly be countered, and then wildly surpassed, by the savings to the nation if the suite of measures achieves its goals.
Functional and relevant information sharing has yet again been identified as a huge priority. The big movement this time is doing away with the half-the-picture results that come from offenders not having all family violence offending recorded on their criminal records.
Amid all the activity aimed, essentially, at faster and more effective intervention it may seem like a cosmetic change that non-fatal strangulation now becomes an offence in its own right, essentially penalised harder.
But that’s because, though awful enough in its own terms, it’s also a huge warning sign. Victims who have been previously strangled by their partner have seven times the risk of later being killed than those who haven’t.
Problematic bits? More emphatic penalties for breaches of protection orders are to be welcomed, but the provision for others to apply for these orders on a victim’s behalf may have pitfalls.
In cases where the victim is too scared or too emphatically robbed of self-preservation instinct to act themselves, it is surely appropriate for others, not necessarily the police, to be able to make the application.
But who exactly, at what stage and in what circumstances? Exquisite care would be needed because the potential for this part of the overall initiatives to over-reach and further victimise an already disempowered person is considerable.