Kilgallon
THREE DECADES after she was forced into hiding when her abusive partner levelled a loaded gun at her head, Ruth Herbert says modern victims of domestic abuse have it even worse than she did.
Herbert fled that relationship, and went on to head the government’s Family Violence Unit and, briefly, the Glenn Inquiry into family violence, but says 15 years of relentless campaigning on the issue will come to a halt if a new report she has written, The Way Forward, goes unheeded.
Herbert’s report, to be launched tomorrow, sets out an entirely new structure for the national response to domestic violence. She says New Zealand is now the worst country in the world for ‘‘interpartner violence’’ and radical change is required.
Her respected standing in the social work community will ensure the report will not pass unnoticed, but Herbert says without resulting change, she is ready to give up the fight.
‘‘I don’t feel that I can step away from this until I have tried everything I can try . . . in many respects, this report is that watershed,’’ Herbert told the StarTimes.
‘‘If, having given all this time and energy over the last 10 years, which has culminated in this report, is not going to bring about the change that is needed . . . if this can’t wake the country up, then we have the country we deserve. I don’t know what the next step would be for me.’’
Sitting in an Auckland cafe, Herbert pauses, and says: ‘‘There is one callout to a domestic violence incident every six minutes for police. Does anyone in this cafe care about that? I am sure they don’t.’’
She feels, she says, like she can see a host of women and children lying on a motorway with a truck screaming towards them – and she’s the only one who has noticed.
HERBERT HAD two young sons, aged three and seven, and was pregnant with her third child when she went into hiding under an assumed name.
After three years of abuse – punching, hitting and strangulation – she had fallen pregnant after marital rape and refused her partner’s demand to have an abortion. He loaded his hunting rifle, held it to her temple, and taunted her.
She fled in secret to the first of a series of women’s refuges, assuming, as cover, the name Lorraine Webb. Then, six months after her daughter Renee was born, the infant died of cot death. ‘‘It is the worst thing in the world to bury one of your kids. You have no idea how bad until you have actually been there,’’ says Herbert.
‘‘I would have committed suicide, absolutely I would have committed suicide. The only thing that kept me going post-abuse and Renee’s death was the kids. Or I could absolutely have taken to alcohol or drugs or any escape, it was absolutely a natural thing to do, but I chose the path of learning from it, growing from it.’’
As Lorraine Webb she organised a 169,000-signature petition for government action to reduce cot deaths, wrote a book Cot Death in New Zealand: Unfolding the Mystery and took delight in seeing cot death numbers fall by 80 per cent between 1985 and 2008.
Herbert sees domestic violence in the same light: ‘‘It’s not about making those experiences a waste, and if I can, I will do something for the greater good.’’
Yes, she admits, cot deaths were an easier issue to address and showed faster results.
‘‘This may take 20 times longer,’’ she says. ‘‘But I am sure, and my aim before I kick this mortal coil in the next 20 years, is that we will see that graph doing what we did for cot death.’’
But for now, she says bluntly, things have simply got worse.
As she reflects on the months in cramped women’s refuges, sharing a bed with her three- year-old and feeding her sons mashed potato and gravy each Wednesday because the benefit money had run out, she says it would be tougher now – and says frontline workers and academic researchers agree.
‘‘Women actually say ‘I wish I had stayed, because it is so much harder on the outside than it was living with the abuser’. Something is seriously wrong when they say that.’’
She got full legal aid, lived on a benefit for seven years as she rebuilt her life and helped her traumatised children, had extended stays in refuges, had unrelenting police support, was granted an instant protection order before a full hearing – all things she says would be much
AllWoman:AModernPortraitofNewZealandWomen. harder these days with reduced legal aid, tougher benefits rules and, she thinks, less supportive policing.
Reflecting on her own journey, Herbert says, for years life was merely about everyday survival. She felt ‘‘like a scared rabbit; constantly vigilant, there on your own’’.
She compares the experience to the trauma of going to war or living through an earthquake.
While Herbert’s former partner stopped searching for her and disappeared from view after seven years, she still lived in fear until she was told of his death.
‘‘Even then I believed it was a set up, a trick. I had to go to the cemetery where he was buried to check there was actually a mound of dirt. Even then I thought ‘maybe they’ve just built this’. That’s how it played on your mind, even 14 years after I had left.
‘‘But his death was freedom for me. When he died, I got a life. It was the phone call that I no longer needed to live in fear.’’
In fact, she says, she was no longer afraid of anything – what could be worse?
Her two sons, Ryan and Jayson are now 38 and 34; Ryan, the elder, is a graphic designer and Jayson a builder and former champion sailor. She is deeply proud of both. Herbert says Jayson was a very outgoing child, the sort who would perform in front of everyone but after the abuse, became so withdrawn she had to get him specialist help to speak above a whisper. After she left her former partner, he asked: ‘‘Did daddy kill you, mummy?’’
WHEN RUTH Herbert agreed in 2012 to head millionaire businessman Owen Glenn’s independent inquiry into domestic violence and child abuse, she thought that the right chance had finally come to speak out.
The Way Forward, she says, is in essence, what she would have delivered had she stayed on in that role: almost, then, the Glenn Inquiry minority report.
Herbert and inquiry operations director Jessica Trask quit their jobs last May after a breakdown in their relationship with Glenn and
There is one callout to a domestic violence incident every six minutes for police. Does anyone in this cafe care about that? I am sure they don’t. Ruth Herbert
formed their own consultancy, the Impact Collective.
Herbert has never spoken about her resignation, and in her first full interview since, remains guarded, but says she has no regrets about taking the job, and none about quitting either.
She says the same about her preceding post at the Ministry of Social Development as the director of the newly-formed Family Violence Unit – a job that came after she wrote a master’s thesis critiquing the government’s implementation of their family violence policy.
Chief family court judge Peter Boshier suggested she turn that criticism into a paper (Pulling it all Together) which argued for a central agency to combat the issue.
‘‘I went to MSD and I went to the Glenn Inquiry because I thought they would be vehicles for me to create this change,’’ she says. ‘‘For various management and process reasons, neither were, so I moved on . . . when you are trying to do something like this, you’ve got to try all avenues possible.’’
At first she thought The Way Forward might be muffled by the flood of other studies recently released on the subject (the first Glenn Inquiry report, the government’s expert advisory panel on domestic violence and the Family Violence Death Review committee annual report) but now she thinks its good to keep the issue in the spotlight. And she says she’s not writing about the problem – we all know there’s a problem – but about doing something entirely different.
In government, she says, she simply saw the scale of change required as far greater than her fellow civil servants.
‘‘So are you more effective making change from the outside or inside?’’
She doesn’t resile from that view now. She says politicians have been guilty of a ‘‘pick and mix’’ approach, of grabbing short-term small fixes instead of addressing the entire problem and everyone, no matter how unqualified, has an opinion. She says that family violence is like an infectious disease, deeply embedded in society and only a long-term, cross-party approach of ‘‘concentrated and unfaulting effort’’ over, perhaps, the next three decades, will work.
Her report, she says, takes a helicopter view and tries to address the whole issue and she realised, finally, she had to do it independently: ‘‘I have not had to get anyone to sign off this report’’.
Now it is complete, Herbert has tried to become ‘‘completely unattached to the outcome’’.
It’s clear, of course, she has not quite managed that. She will continue her consultancy work, at least, and there may be a cathartic effect but if there is not a catalytic one, she will be deeply frustrated.
‘‘I feel,’’ she says, thoughtfully, ‘‘I have finally been able to have the voice I wanted to have.’’