Partner violence is child abuse

At the Children and Family Violence Conference, Wellington, July 1999, J J Taylor, National Family Violence Coordinator, Police National Headquarters, spoke on the child witness pilot project (see here for speech notes).

We see from his notes that:

Some 34,500 reports of family violence were entered on the police computer in 1998.

He looked at 166 of these reports where there were children present or residing with the "victim" (note that these were just alleged victims at this stage, see here for another example of this).

For 45.2% of these offences or incidents, the police had been there previously, with one in five of them, they had been there three to five times previously, and with six percent they had been there ten more more times previously. If these percentages are representative, then out of 100 cases, there would be at least 60 additional cases for those families with 10 or more visits, say 80 for the 3-5 previous visits, and 19 for the remainder of the 45 families with more than one visit. In other words, the 100 families would show up on about 259 records.

He goes on to state:

"I also had the names of the victims and offenders checked for criminal court histories. I found that nearly half of them (46.4%) had one or more previous court conviction, not only for violence but seventy per cent of them had a conviction for dishonesty.

Most interesting to me was that nearly one in three (30%) of the male adults had a domestic protection order against them."

This could be read in several ways. One possibility is that a high proportion of female victims had previous convictions for dishonesty, and were granted unjustified protection orders against the men.

It may be that police procedures result in a disproportionate recording of violence by men (see also here and here - the latter is of special relevance, because there J J Taylor treats "man assaults woman" as synonymous with family violence). This links to the following statement from Taylor's speech notes:

"Given that child abuse and family violence mean the same..."

The result may be to apparently show a higher proportion of child abuse to be by men than would otherwise be observed.

Stuart Birks

26 July 1999