There was an Insight programme on "Hitting Home", broadcast on National Radio, 8.06p.m., 18 September 1995.

In any programme such as this, participants' comments are edited and intermingled. I have gathered the comments of individual speakers and further edited them, but hopefully their meaning has not been distorted. My comments are in brackets, [ ].

Justice Secretary, John Belgrave:

I think fundamentally it brings a dimension of what do men feel and what do men acknowledge in this rather complex area of domestic violence. I think coming out of the report are a number of conclusions that were not purported to be a survey of the population at large, it was a survey of 2000 men which was then reduced to a further subset of 200, so I think what we are hoping to get out of it and I think the comment made about it thus far does seem to point that some of the report's conclusions do appear to be going to make a fairly significant contribution to what has been and what will remain to be a very complex issue. There is as you know a domestic violence bill currently in front of the Parliament and one would hope that some of the evidence coming out of this research may be of help to the final form of that legislation.

[Not representative, but affecting legislation?]

The report studying men's attitudes to violence has obviously come up with conclusions based on men's attitudes. It doesn't say yes or no to a fact that women in a relationship can also be psychologically abusive. It's not purporting to say they can't.

[Discounting the possibility of physical violence by women? Straus says "Although there may be exceptions that I missed, every study among the more than 30 describing some type of sample that is not self-selective ... has found a rate of assault by women on male partners that is about the same as the rate of assault by men on female partners." See p.70 of Straus M.A., "Physical assaults by Wives: a Major Social Problem", chapter 4 in Gelles R.J. and Loseke D. (eds) (1993) Current Controversies on Family Violence, London: Sage]

It is simply though giving the position in relation to men in a relationship.

[The position of men need only consider men as perpetrators, not as victims?]

And I think that one's got to keep in mind that psychological abuse can carry on for years. Things that are said by the stronger member of a relationship, often the male in many relationships has economic influence over his female partner, things that are said from a psychological perspective can rankle and hurt for a long long time, and I think that to say that that, as is said by its critics, is a trivial issue, certainly I wouldn't agree with.

I would have thought, as is said in the report, the humiliation of your partner in front of her friends, or the denigration of her family (and I think maybe the mother-in-law is part of that), I think psychologically over the years that is just as much an issue as physical assault given the manifestation of a physical assault is seen straight away, the manifestation of a psychological assault can go on over time.

[Psychological abuse is serious, plus assumptions that men are often the stronger members of relationships, and this is due to economic power, generating the conclusion that psychological abuse is predominantly by men against women? There is no evidence given for this, and, although the Justice Department's Intrafamily Income Study appeared to be trying to show that men had more control in relationships, this was far from conclusive and the study itself has been strongly criticised.]

(on why no ethnic breakdown) - I don't think political correctness has anything to do with it at all. It was a study of male violence, male attitudes to violence.

[Male attitudes to and experience of violence by them, not of violence they received.]

I'm acknowledging that this is not complete. I think in the context of what it tried to do it was comprehensive, but for completeness as I have said, if we have more resource and comments coming in do we start to subdivide some of those groups of males and look further at it? And is there a need for a similar but, I think, less comprehensive exercise with women given that women and attitudes to violence, women's experience of violence has been and is being continually researched?

["Women's experience of violence" is continuously researched in the same way that Hitting Home is a study of men's experience of violence, just from one side. There is no New Zealand research of men as victims of women's violence, and there is no research of women as perpetrators of violence against men. John Belgrave's own comments here indicate that he does not think that the latter exists as a problem, and that any psychological abuse of men by women is a minor problem in comparison to men's psychological abuse of women. If these issues are not researched, it is hard to see on what basis such sweeping and important assumptions are made. If his views represent the official line, it is hard to see how the necessary research will ever be undertaken.]

Neil Billington, the programme presenter, says that women's groups have also endorsed the Hitting Home report. Maria Bradshaw, spokesperson for Women's Refuge believes it offers a unique insight into how New Zealand men perceive the issue of family violence:

I think that what we do is we have a look at what we know about who are the major perpetrators of violence in our society and so far the research we have is sort of aimed at those people whose violence and abuse is in the public record, people who have been arrested, people who have been to prison or whatever. And we know that approximately 97 per cent of perpetrators of violence in New Zealand who come to the public attention are males. So it seems a very sensible place to start, but it doesn't seem like a finishing point.

[The "public record" arises from the programmes in place, including HAIPP. To quote Straus again: "Studies of residents in shelters for battered women are sometimes cited to show that it is only their male partners who are violent. However, these studies rarely obtain or report information on assaults by women, and when they do, they ask only about self-defense. ... Giles-Simms ... found that in the year prior to coming to a shelter, 50% of the women reported assaulting their partners, and in the six months after leaving the shelter, 41.7% reported an assault against a spouse." (p.71)]

The experience that I have in Refuge is that what women say to me is that physical abuse is appalling, it's horrible, it's terrible and I never want to minimise physical abuse, but the thing that does the most damage to them is the emotional abuse. When somebody attacks you as a person, when they damage your soul and your whole feelings of self worth, and when they make you feel like you don't have a place in this society, you're not good enough, you're totally worthless, that has far more long term effects than physical abuse.

[So psychological abuse is more serious.]

It's really about the effect for me rather than the action. It's about, in a relationship, somebody having more power than somebody else. It's about the effect of the abuse.

[Is the "men have more power" assumption appearing again?]

Presenter: According to the Justice Department, the survey of 2000 men gives the first national figures for domestic abuse in New Zealand.

[But is it representative, given John Belgrave's comment?]

Doctor Allison Morris, Director of Criminology at Victoria University:

It gives us an indication of men's attitudes towards violence within the family. ... 5% of men in New Zealand use extreme forms of violent behaviour. ... there are a population of men who do use very severe forms of violence to regulate their relationships with women. ... a statistic from a random sample of men.

[and on Straus and Gelles, etc.] There is in fact some American research which shows that women are more abusive than men in a within a family situation, ... although the level of violence by men and by women is the same within the family, the violence by the women tends to be defensive, the violence by the men tends to be aggressive.

[Straus, in the chapter referred to above, says: ""In previous work I have explained the high rates of attacks on spouses by wives as largely a response to or a defense against assault by the partner ... However, new evidence raises questions about this interpretation." (p.73).

He goes on to say: "Of the 495 couples in the 1985 National Family Violence Survey for whom one or more assaultive incidents were reported by a woman respondent, the husband was the only violent partner in 25.9% of the cases, the wife was the only one to be violent in 25.5% of the cases, and both were violent in 48.6% of the cases. thus a minimum estimate of violence by wives that is not self-defense because the wife is the only one to have used violence in the past 12 months is 25%. Brush (1990) reports similar results for the couples in the National Survey of Families and Households." (p.74)]

Neil Billington (presenter) - It was disappointing to some that the study didn't look more closely into the social factors that contribute to domestic violence. It accepted the views of the men surveyed that, for the most part, they knew that what they were doing was wrong, but lost control of their anger. Many who work in the area of abuse believe that violence and abuse are used to maintain control of another person. Our society, they say, has long sanctioned this sort of domination by men over women. ... The messages endorsing male strength through violence are still very pervasive.

Brenda Pilot, manager of the Family Violence Unit at the Department of Social Welfare:

It raises a problem, the notion of what it is to be a man. ... What you identify is almost a culture of violence.

[Making the assumption that violence is a male phenomenon]

Stephen Jacobs, Men for Non-Violence - I think it would have been useful if [the study] had [looked at issues of culture and ethnicity] because we work on the basis is an issue which goes across cultures and that violence is fairly much in equal proportions. That's the theory that we work on. I think we are too scared to do research which might show us differently than that, and it might be useful if we had that, but I understand their reasons why they didn't do it ... that's what would take everyone's attention, and it would cease to become an issue of the whole population.

[But the data coming from HAIPP and the Women's Refuge are very clear, if we are to accept the "public record". From the 1993 Annual Report of the National Collective of Independent Women's refuges Inc., of the women using refuge services, 47.01% were Maori, 8.14% Pacific Islanders, 40.46% Pakeha, and 4.39% other. Of the abusers, 96.35% of whom were male, there were 43.2% Maori, 9.30% Pacific Islander, 42.57% Pakeha, and 4.93% other. these figures refer to 1992. The report also states that of the 1991 female population, 12.6% were Maori, and 4.75% were Pacific Islanders. It adds that "Partly this [disproportionate representation] is a reflection of their limited access to a range of resources in comparison to Pakeha women." Given the link between HAIPP, Women's Refuge, and men's groups working in the area of male domestic violence, he should be well aware of these data.]

The other thing that we face in New Zealand is the very high suicide rate by young males. Now we would say that suicide is also violence, it's just against yourself rather than against another person. So a very high suicide rate is no different than those 18 to 27 year olds saying that it's not OK to be physically violent to a female partner, but we still are. I'm sure if you ask most young males they wouldn't say that suicide was OK either, but they're killing themselves at a very high rate.

[Would suicide attempts also count as violence, and if so, what does that say about women and violence? From the New Zealand Medical Journal, Vol.107(987), 12 October 1994, Hall A.K. "Changing epidemiology and management of deliberate self poisoning in Christchurch", using 1992 data: "There were 622 presentations (compared to 531 in 1989) of deliberate self poisoning by substance injection ... the female to male ratio was 1.5:1.0 (cf 2.1:1), with three quarters of patients being under the age of 35." New Zealand Mortality and Demographic Data 1990, (Department of Statistics, 1993),Table 6, shows suicide and self-inflicted poisoning by solid or liquid substances as accounting for 33 female and 28 male deaths.]

Greg Newbold, Sociologist:

... a lot of this involves interactive violence ... this cycle of violence does not just involve men, it involves women very much.

I think when people are misinformed about violence then that is dangerous. Misinformation, false information, wrong information, partial information, partial truths are not good enough. Partial truths lead to partial solutions, false truths lead to false solutions. And if this report becomes accepted and the conclusions of the report which indicate that men are principally responsible for domestic violence, if these become widely accepted and the role of women in domestic violence is ignored, then we have a problem, because we will only be addressing half of the problem.

I would agree with Greg Newbold that there is a lot of misinformation about violence within families. From the statements made by most of the people on this Insight programme, I would not hold out much hope for the possibility that future research will ask the questions necessary to get a more realistic picture.

Stuart Birks

25 October, 1995