The dark side of the lockdown
The death of an Auckland baby has shined a light on unreported violence during the coronavirus pandemic. Reporting by Edward Gay, Bevan Hurley and Blair Ensor.
The infant had just turned three months old when she died on April 13 in Middlemore Hospital. She’d suffered serious injuries in an assault at her South Auckland home a few days earlier.
The country had been in level 4 lockdown for three weeks, and the homicide investigation – Operation Searcy – was complicated by the public health emergency unfolding at the time.
In the days after her death, family and friends poured out messages of grief on social media, unable in some cases to comfort each other in person.
This week, her grief-stricken mother was still coming to terms with the loss.
‘‘I don’t like talking about it. I just can’t believe it. A lot of people are asking and I’m lost.’’
On Friday, acting Detective Inspector Shaun Vickers said a 21-year-old man had been charged with the baby’s murder, and would appear in Counties Manukau District Court tomorrow. None of those involved can be named for legal reasons.
As New Zealand went into level 4 lockdown on March 24, there were widespread concerns that family violence would increase.
And while reported crime overall was down, charities supporting the victims of such abuse were seeing a completely different picture.
Domestic abuse charity Shine said they noticed a three-fold increase in the number of high risk incidents during the level 4 lockdown, from two per week to six or seven.
Shine policy advisor Holly Carrington said the lockdown had exacerbated feelings of entrapment.
‘‘We’re not talking about situations where people get angry and fight with each other, we’re talking about when one person is controlling every aspect of another person’s life.’’
She said the lack of an escape route for partners had seen more children exposed to the violence.
‘‘There is huge crossover with intimate partner violence and child abuse and neglect. Even if only one gets reported, so commonly both are being perpetrated. Usually by men. If someone is controlling and abusing a partner, they’re quite likely doing it to the children.’’
She said there was an increasing body of research that shows children who witness intimate partner violence will have worse outcomes than if they were the target of violence.
Women’s Refuge chief executive Ang Jury said she was perplexed by what she’d seen during lockdown: after an initial spike, domestic violence cases had flattened out.
‘‘It’s all very weird. Logically and intuitively you just have to know that lockdown could not have been a good thing for a whole lot of people. It makes no sense that everyone just decided to love everyone and be kind.
‘‘It would be hard to believe that it was anything other than underreporting. To say what’s really going on, Christ it’s anybody’s guess.’’
Both Carrington and Jury feel New Zealanders are still blinded to the prevalence of violence in the home by the fact that there isn’t accurate publicly available data on the extent of the problem.
They expressed disappointment with the New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey, released last week.
The report, released by the Ministry of Justice, found victims experienced more than 250,000 incidents of offences by family members over the past 12 months. Women were more than twice as likely as men to experience offences by family members.
Women aged between 15 and 29, Ma¯ori, LGBTQ and singles
were significantly more likely to be victims of family violence.
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said the survey had dedicated sections to family violence and intimate partner violence, and a lot of related facts appeared in other sections.
But Jury said underlying forms of control required more research. ‘‘One of the things it doesn’t cover when it’s looking at intimate partner violence are things like abuse of a pet, financial abuse, psychological abuse.
‘‘Any incident of physical violence is always preceded by other non-physical forms. It never just comes out of the blue. If we’re not even going to look at the experience of those things how on earth can we get serious about tackling the problem? It didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, which is really disappointing because they spend a lot of money on that survey.’’
There were, however, many bright spots to come out of lockdown.
Jury said an Italian, who was in New Zealand for the America’s Cup and ended up stuck here in lockdown, gave the refuge $50,000 in food vouchers. Ashley Bloomfield T-shirts and tote bags designed by a Dunedin artist and sold all over the world raised nearly $150,000.
ANZ chipped in $500,000, which was distributed among the 40 refuges around the country. And then there were the everyday Kiwis who donated a few dollars in support of the ongoing Gift a Safe Night campaign.
Jury said: ‘‘The thing that really surprised me about that was a huge number of New Zealanders are facing a future that is really uncertain, and all of those people are wondering ‘can I pay the mortgage, can I feed my family, my KiwiSaver is going down the toilet’ and they are still supporting us.’’
Similarly, Shine’s Carrington said they had noticed an outpouring of generosity, from small financial donations to a $100,000 from a corporate sponsor.
‘‘We’re not talking about situations where people get angry and fight with each other, we’re talking about when one person is controlling every aspect of another person’s life.’’
Holly Carrington
Shine policy advisor