More justice for victims of family abuse

FAMILY violence remains a dreadful problem. Official attitudes changed long ago: The police no longer dismiss it as ‘‘just a domestic’’, although laypeople sometimes still use the phrase. Laws have been changed to reflect a tougher official attitude. And publicity campaigns such as the ‘‘It’s not okay’’ television ads try to change popular thinking.

Despite all this, women and children continue to die regularly at the hands of family members. The report of the Family Violence Death Review Committee found 126 family violence homicides between 2009 and 2012. The damage goes far wider than the terrible loss of life. The report says 240 children have been afflicted by their exposure to these horrors.

The committee makes some useful suggestions for reform, including making non-fatal strangulation a separate crime. Attempted strangulation is a ‘‘red flag’’ for future offending, yet it is often prosecuted as the relatively minor offence of ‘‘male versus female’’ assault. This means that the danger to the victim is underestimated and even unrecognised by judges and social agencies. Making it a serious offence would change this and save lives.

Social agencies need to do more to support victims and help them escape their tormentors, the committee says. Instead of trying just to ‘‘empower’’ the victims, the agencies need to ‘‘contain and challenge’’ the abusers. Part of this involves recognising the danger signals such as extremely jealous behaviour and threatening to kill.

This change in attitudes would probably help, and the committee is right to call for family members to take similar actions and look for similar signs. Yet all this is more easily said than acted on. The committee points to the terrible situation of women and children trapped in gang houses. Here, ‘‘containing and challenging’’ the abusers is fraught with risk.

There are still serious problems with the law. A woman who kills her tormentor after being battered and terrorised at home for years often finds herself in a terrible legal plight. A law change in 2002 allows a sentence of less than life imprisonment for murder but only where a life sentence would be ‘‘manifestly unjust’’.

The law change was aimed partly to cater for the abused and tormented woman, but research suggests that the courts rarely use it. So unless she can successfully plead self-defence, in which case she is acquitted, the woman may face an excessive prison term. And research also suggests that New Zealand courts are more restrictive than similar jurisdictions in allowing the self-defence argument.

Some states still allow the defence of provocation, which reduces the offence from murder to manslaughter. This defence was abolished here in 2009 as it was clearly open to use by psychopathic male murderers.

Something needs to be done to allow justice to be done for abused women. The committee backs a Law Commission recommendation of a modified defence of self-defence in such cases. That idea deserves serious debate.