Kia Rangatira te Mahi – work of the Chiefs

Kia Rangatira te Mahi – work of 

the Chiefs 

Transcript of a presentation at the No To Violence Conference, Melbourne, 

Australia, November 2012 

Presenters 

Roni Albert and Ariana Simpson 

Te Whakaruruhau Maori Women's Refuge 

Darrin Haimona 

Te Hauora a Ngati Houa 

Note 

This presentation was transcribed by a professional transcription company and then lightly copyedited 

for readability and length. There are some gaps in the transcript (indicated by "…"), where the 

recording was not clear. 

The transcript may also inadvertently contain errors of language or fact, and NTV apologises in 

advance for these. Please contact rodney@ntv.org.au if you have any concerns regarding this 

transcription. 

Transcript 

Roni: I feel very honoured and privileged to be here. I acknowledge the ancestors of this land, and 

feel honoured and privileged to have the opportunity to present about our service. It’s unique. 

We’ve existed in Hamilton and the area of Hamilton-Waikato for the past 26 years. We were formed 

in 1986, and we were the first Maori Women’s Refuge under the umbrella of our National Collective 

of Independent Women’s Refuges. At that time there were about 54 refuges. 

So we were really lucky. Our guidelines were taken from the general refuges that existed. However, 

we took our organisation into the area of marae and how we take care of the people. That’s been 

part of our guidance. 

There have been many changes over the years but our main focus was on working with women and 

children. But there were only a few of us, a small band of women, and a really humble little safe 

house of about four bedrooms. At the time we were dealing with about 60 cases per month. And 

Hamilton is an area of about 25–30,000 people, but we got families from all over the place. Our 

service was unique because we took the guidance from our families. That meant that often we were 

up against systems, we were up against community, we were up against families. Whatever the 

families needed, we helped and worked towards providing it. 

My reason for working in a refuge was very much about the protection of people and my fight 

against the injustices that people sustained. I guess a lot stemmed from my own upbringing. I was 

raised by a pakeha family from the age of six weeks. And so I knew very little about my own 

background and where my mother came from. I learnt that on the way. I learnt that my mother had

had to let 10 of us go from the family as required by what was then the Department of Social 

Welfare. We were all taken from her, and two of us were given back to her. 

And one of the things that my pakeha mother had said to me was that the social workers told her 

that to get us back she would need to do three things. She would need to marry a pakeha, she would 

need to stop drinking, and she’d need to get a house, stable for us. And I always remembered that 

because I had my own issues that I carried through my years. I guess in some ways it brought home 

to me a sense of great injustice and a feeling of protectiveness. 

And so our work with the families often involved gaining that support for the women and children’s 

needs – getting them out of their homes, helping them through the legal systems, getting them a 

house. So we needed to start working alongside our systems or our ministries as a faster way of 

getting access for those families. 

Then the women had an opportunity to decide whether they needed to break from the violent 

relationship or whether they wanted to go back. What we discovered in the early days is that a big 

percentage of our women went back to their families, went back to their partner, or their men. And 

we weren’t sure about this. Again, it was only a guidance. Really, you can’t force someone to say, 

“You’re going to get killed if you go back. This is going to happen to your children”. 

We needed to make sure that we had systems set up, and then that the woman wanted to come 

out. They wanted to have a chance to decide, “What do I want to do for my future?” So we were 

shortcutting things. We had to make sure that the woman had financial assistance, that we set up a 

system that was going to be immediate, and that it would sustain her. We set up a process for 

housing. When the woman decides she wants to leave her home, close it down, and go into new 

housing, it needs to be done quickly. 

Some of these things take around six to eight weeks, and often we were held up by the systems, as I 

guess you would know. We’re really no different to you. I can imagine that, without any put-down to 

the governments, both sides have their issues. The most reliable thing about our government is the 

inconsistencies, and I know that that’s the case over here too. And we often can’t go beyond these 

difficulties; they keep us in one place. The women can’t make that break from the family or look at a 

way to maintain their safety. 

So these are some of the areas that we worked on and built up over the years. It’s taken 26 years for 

our relationship with some of these systems to settle in. And because we’re such a small service, a 

small Maori service, we have so much to contend with – from racism, to hierarchy, to not being 

listened to because we’re female. That’s what came through for us. So we had to find better, 

sharper ways of being able to get what we wanted. 

That opportunity came probably within the last six years. And we were grateful. We were funded for 

a time by one of the ministries, $1.2 million. And so we grew from a group of five women volunteers 

to 30 people now, and we’re all paid. 

We’re trying to hold that together, but what it did was it helped us develop some of the areas we 

wanted to work with. We knew back then that one of the key things we needed was to work with 

our men. Getting to our men first was the fastest way to be able to work at protecting the women 

and children. And because our group was able to be better resourced, we had the chance of being 

able to stretch that out and develop it. 

No To Violence 2012 Australian Conference on Responses to Men's Domestic and Family Violence 

www.ntvconference.org 

Kia Rangatira te Mahi – work of the Chiefs Page 2 of 12

Some of those contacts and supports that we had at that time was actually with the prison. We had 

Corrections, the Regional Manager from Corrections and Ministry of Social Development come and 

ask us whether we thought there would be an opportunity for support from Corrections or working 

with the prisons. We thought not, because most of the time we’re trying to get our men in there. In 

some extreme cases, our men need to calm down, and they stay in prison for as long as we need 

them to. And that often doesn’t happen. 

It meant that we needed to get closer to some of the hierarchy, some of the people we needed to 

collaborate with in order to protect the women further. We needed justice when our women would 

go through the courts, and the courts would deal out lenient sentences, or something that was 

pretty horrific. 

So we would go and fight. And we always took direction from our women. Once we had five women 

in our house who didn’t want to do court counselling. Now, that was mandated by the court. A 

Family Court had mandated that they needed to do counselling jointly with their partners. But they 

were afraid of their partners. They’d just come in, it was really new, and it wasn’t safe. And so they 

said, “What can we do, Roni?” I said, “Well, you could boycott it”. And so that’s what happened; we 

boycotted it. We got into a bit of trouble, but we still boycotted it. We are okay about going to the 

extreme. From that time, we knew that any case that meant we wouldn’t be protected by the 

system, or we didn’t have help from those avenues, we needed to go beyond that. 

There are many different stories about what we did for protection. Unfortunately, some of the areas 

got us into trouble with the systems, but as long as we had that guidance from the family and that 

support, then we could take matters into our own hands because our intention was to protect the 

women and children. 

So sometimes we’d have to cut through some of those avenues of the law in order to protect. That 

was our priority. 

As this relationship developed over the past six years, that’s probably been the most unique thing 

that’s happened. But we also have a work party of our men who have been long-term prisoners. 

We’re talking about five to 15 years that they’ve been in prison. They’re usually the hard-core men 

who come out with the guard, and they do work. 

Mainly they’ve been doing work on the outskirts of the cities. We’re probably the first organisation 

that they’ve worked for in the city. They come out and do the maintenance for our houses. We’re 

there to build trust. A lot of the men mainly know us as home-breakers, a bunch of lesbians. You 

know, they, “took our families away”. Well that’s not what we do. And I guess instead of talking to 

that, we worked alongside the men. So they actually worked on our women’s houses, they repaired 

the damage in the houses. 

So that was some of our work. Because we were voluntary, we used to call our families or anyone 

else we could snap up to help us to move and pack up and get those families to safety. Now we work 

alongside the prison, with our men. And the impact of that has been immense – immense on the 

men, but also immense on us. For us, we needed to change the judgement that we had. Personally, I 

needed to change judgement because I expected that when you’re violent and you continue to go 

in, there is no way that you’re likely to make a change, and that it would take intense work to do 

that. But that needed to be put aside, no matter what anyone had done. And we did put that aside, 

or I did put that aside. And the benefits have been great for our women, for our service, and also for 

the men. 




In one of the first houses we placed them in, we said to the guard, “We need this house shut down 

within three hours”. The men went in, the damage was huge. There was blood spattered all over the 

place, there were kids’ plates, and so on. And the men didn’t speak; they cleaned and patched up 

the house within two days. And they came back to speak to our staff. And we didn’t know why they 

were coming back, but they did it to acknowledge what had happened and what they had seen, and 

that they recognised how they’d been a part of it. They acknowledged how they had left their own 

partners, and how some of them had grown in their own families, but had never had a chance to 

give back. 

So it’s become a giving-back for us. It’s unusual, and we’re getting a lot of odd looks and queries 

because we’re a women’s refuge and we’re working alongside our men. We work closely with them. 

That’s been the best relationship for us, as I said. And one of the things that stands out for me 

working alongside them so they don’t harm again – is where this development will go. They really 

recognise, “The decision that you made to get yourself in there, we don’t want you doing that on our 

show”. 

So there’s a lot of dialogue between us about what the men have permitted. We’ve talked about the 

amendment and they want to know how to amend. My discussions often with the men are that, 

“You can't amend with the victim. You can amend in another way within the community, or with 

yourself”. The priority is, you get yourself right. Because you may never have the opportunity to be 

able to speak to them. 

Sometimes it’s taken a lot out of me, when you hear about the rapes, or about the gang-rape of a 

15-year-old. One of the men came and hid with them … I knew there was something that he wanted 

to say … For him, his daughter was 18. He had gang-raped a young girl at 15. And he said, “I wasn’t 

meant to, but I’ve never … ” He’s never forgiven himself. Even in the 15 years he spent in gaol, he 

had not forgiven himself. And my heart just went out to him and I wanted to work alongside him, 

because for me, the most important thing again is the protection of our women and children, our 

community, and our men. 

It feels like I’ve done a turnaround where I’m protecting our men. I am sure they have a lot to learn 

from men who come from prison. And taking them out into our community, people don’t trust 

them. You know, you have killed, you have maimed, you have injured, you have harmed; and that’s 

often what people see. But when they see Refuge working alongside them, that’s a different story. It 

means that we need to come up and say, “It’s all right. We’ve got this one covered”. We know it's a 

trusting and a building for us, because we want to eliminate that. 

Darrin: [Maori speech.] Greetings. My name is Darrin. I’m just giving thanks for the sacred lands that 

we are working on at the moment, and also the ancestors who are here with us. 

The words Kia rangatira te mahi are really about creating leaders or rangatira. But in some 

instances, we use the term to define what is best practice. Kia rangatira, how we become best at 

what we do. How do we make our work best practice? 

We used Maori terms specifically to define what that is. So if you’re trying to figure out where we’re 

leading to, it is actually about what makes best practice. And initially it was about what makes best 

practice working with the men, and how we develop a best practice model. We searched 

everywhere. Twenty-something years ago, we started in New Zealand to implement what was then 

the Duluth Model of working with domestic violence and systemic responses. Alongside Roni and the 

refuges, we were part of the systemic responses in developing them. 




As Maori people, we were part of a mandatory arrest process. So we were part and parcel of the 

police response, which is now about our integrated system, courts etc. I would say that Roni and Ari 

were fronting a lot of that work at the time as Maori women, and being challenged by our own 

Maori people about how we could participate in the system that continued to arrest our people and 

put them into incarceration. And the response of our women at that time, was, how could we as 

Maori people continue to condone and ignore and compromise the violence that was happening to 

our Maori women and children? 

We were constantly locked in this debate. In New Zealand Maori men are four times more likely 

than any race of men in our country to be arrested for domestic violence. We’re four times more 

likely. That doesn’t say there are four times more cases that we’re involved in, because we’re 

actually only 12% of the population. We’re four times more likely to be arrested because we’re 

Maori. And we’re two times more likely to be convicted because we’re Maori. 

So we’re not just dealing with issues of domestic violence in New Zealand; we’re dealing also with 

issues of racism, sexism, poverty, classism, you name it. So when we talk about best practice here, 

we cannot address domestic violence by looking only at the individual violence that a man 

perpetrates within his family. It has to be seen in connection. 

So when Roni talks about working with these men from prison, there’s the instinct to say, “Sorry, he 

raped my daughter. I don’t want to know about him”. And so the responsibility around that sits 

inside there. But what she’s trying to say, and I think that we all recognise it after a while, is that 

we’re all part of a community response. In my case, eventually I might have to work with my own 

uncles, my own brothers, my own family members. 

Roni is saying that as a tribal group of people, we now see these perpetrators and abusers, and we 

always have, as not only being perpetrators towards our mothers, our daughters, and our sisters, 

but they are our brothers, our fathers, our nephews, and possibly our grandchildren. So the 

responsibility for us to support change is even greater. We cannot just say, “Incarcerate, incarcerate 

there”. Because actually, change has to come from us being part of both the problem and the 

solution. I wish we could just be the solution, but actually we’re part of the problem as well. 

In New Zealand, Maori women are four times more likely than any race of women in New Zealand to 

be physically and sexually abused. Four times more than any race in our own land and country. 

Maori women aged between 15 and 27 years of age are seven times more likely to be hospitalised 

than any race of women in New Zealand. 

Now, that doesn’t mean to say that the abusers or perpetrators are all Maori because actually 

they’re not. They’re white men as well as other races of men. Australians as well who have married 

and participated with our women. But it seems to be that in our country, it is okay for that level of 

violence to occur. 

So a number of years ago, we started to establish this movement. From working solely for the 

protection of women, Roni has now moved onto the belief, “I can’t create the change that needs to 

happen if I just stay here working in this space with our women. Because I can’t continue to protect 

them unless our Maori men and the rest of society participate in taking responsibility around them”. 

And I’m sure that you all agree with that. 

I’m introducing this idea into the theme. You see, in New Zealand, we’re part of a colonised group of 

people who have had our lands and our language removed, just like our Aboriginal brothers and 

sisters here. Our language, our culture, you name it. We’re still bearing the effects of that. And so 

we’re survivors of all of this. 




We wanted to know why we’re so violent now. Was it an innate part of our culture? Well, we 

checked it all out, and the earliest writings of the settlers who came to New Zealand spoke about 

these Maori men who were the primary caregivers of their children. It wasn’t the women. There are 

even writings in New Zealand that talk about Maori men treating their women as companions and 

partners. In fact, a common statement was that the status of Maori women was the envy of 

European women. 

So I sat there and said, “What happened?” This was in the 1700s up to the early 1800s – 1824 – 

before we signed the Treaty. That’s only 200 years ago. What happened? I know we have a place in 

my community in Pirongia, where they set up the first Mission schools and where they taught our 

children English. And our people were so excited. “Good, we’re going to get an education.” They 

sent their children into these schools. And the children came back, some beaten with canes – a 

number because they were speaking in Maori probably, but also that was the way that they were 

taught. 

The people from our tribe were appalled by this. They had never experienced a child being hit and 

beaten. So they banned their children from going to school. They banned them until the senior 

children were forced, of course, into these schools. 

Today in New Zealand, our Maori children make up half of the cases of violent offences in our 

country. And yet traditionally, we were appalled that anybody could even think about touching a 

child, because they were considered to be sacred, tapu. Women were sanctified, tapu, sacred, 

because they bore children. So what we have is a whole cultural change. 

What we recognise now is that the violence that we perpetuate today is part of the violence of our 

colonisation. It’s part and parcel of that. It’s my self-hatred. I’ve been all around the world, looking at 

family violence. Terms of violence include “You bitch”, “You slut”, “You whore”, and so on. But of 

course you come into Indigenous cultures and you’re not just a bitch, a slut and a whore, you’re a 

black bitch, a black slut and a black whore. 

So you are hated not only because of your gender, but also because of your race. And the people 

who are saying these things are sometimes the same colour as you. So it’s a self-hatred that we have 

and we perpetuate this hatred against our women and our children. And so these are the levels of 

violence. 

And when you talk about a holistic approach to violence, then you’d better get real, because we’ve 

got to deal with the past stuff as well. We’re not just talking about systems’ responses, we’re talking 

about a whole history of occasions. 

Currently in New Zealand, the highest numbers perpetrating violence are actually our young Maori 

youth. So we are looking at this situation and doing work within our country and within our 

organisation as well. We have to make the changes from the inside. 

So we’re talking about a change around integration and using systems from a traditional position to 

a contemporary one. Now I’d like to introduce Ariana, who’s worked with us in the past in relation to 

the Courts and so on. She’s going to give her impressions about where we’re sitting now. 

Ariana: Thank you. I’m from the Bay of Plenty and East Coast of the North Island. Te Whānau-ā- 

Apanui is my coastal tribe, and Ngāti Whaoa is the Bay of Plenty tribe that I came from. 

As Darrin was saying, all of us have histories of very strong, powerful women who were leaders of 

their time. When I was at university, I did directed research on what we call puhi, who were 




particular young women who were usually the daughters of chiefs or significant females within the 

tribe, and considered that by the tribe. I got most of my information from tribal narratives and 

songs. And there was a heap of information there. We went from a place of sanctuary, sanctity, of 

specialness, to the place where we are today, which is quite sad. 

And so we still have a lived memory, really. My grandmother died four years ago; she was 95. She 

was born in 1913 and she remembers the times when she was brought up on the East Coast, if a 

child or a woman was violated, she remembers the man was banished from that tribal area. 

So you weren’t an individual who could just run around and be unaccounted for. Banishment in 

those days meant that that message was carried right through to other tribal areas. Everybody, in 

fact, knew about what you had done, where you had come from, etc. So you just couldn’t enter 

another tribal area without being known. 

One of the things I learnt while working with the Hamilton Abuse Intervention Project in the early 

days, in this power and control stuff, was that central to any violence is this notion of isolation. I 

guess that comes with the whole process of colonisation for us. It’s to individualise and to isolate us 

from our own accountability sources. For me, that was one of the reasons we decided we needed to 

open up our work to involving our men again. And actually, some of them would probably say, “I’m 

better off to go to gaol,” rather than work alongside us. Because what we have in us is a fire in our 

belly that says, “Our world is much bigger than yours. You are not more important than the whole of 

the family and of our community, our tribes. You aren’t the be all and end all of our people. And so 

this is what it means to be you”. 

So to be accountable in our eyes means a whole lot of stuff. And it’s not a private issue, it’s a public 

issue. That’s the difference. It’s already been said today, but I wanted to talk about confidentially, 

what it is – and privacy, the Privacy Act and Family Courts, where information from Family Court 

cannot be used in a District Court matter. Yet we know that when a male assaults a female it’s a 

District Court matter. But information can’t go over there, and so we have this integrated 

community response. The idea is great, but I have to say that from beginning the collaboration stuff 

back in 1990 – are we any safer? It doesn’t feel that way. In fact, it feels more like we’re now being 

battered not just as individuals, but as families and community agencies, particularly as Indigenous 

agencies. We’re now being battered by the system that’s meant to protect us. 

So the individual woman who comes into our service has to meet all of the conditions. Nine times 

out of ten, she gets beaten by her partner, and she suffers ... Usually the police are called, and 

children are removed if they have witnessed the violence or they were there and she "failed" to 

protect them. Usually the man doesn’t get charged because it needs a statement from the woman to 

say that “He inflicted these injuries on me” etc. 

So you can see it’s a huge barrier to us being able to stop the violence, to getting our people to see 

that they’re participating in a system that in fact is breaking them down even more. 

Going on to integration. I was really involved in community intervention back then. I used to go to 

the Courts, and our main role there was to monitor the system’s response to family violence. I’m 

talking about the Courts, the Family Court, the District Court, the police plus the main government 

agencies. 

There were obviously times when the police wouldn’t come until maybe the next day. There were 

also times when the Courts would sentence the man to go back to the home where the woman was. 

And there were times when she would go to get a Protection Order. And if she could get a 

Protection Order without him knowing, all she could think about were the consequences for doing 




that from both sides of the family. She was then more fearful than she was prior to having a 

Protection Order. 

I look at the system now, and it scares me. It scares me because our children aren’t in a better 

situation for their future. A lot of us have taken some really bold steps to dealing with family 

violence and we’re being looked at in our own communities, and people are saying, “What are you 

doing?” No matter what we do, always in front of us are the wellbeing and safety of women and 

children, always. 

Since working with our families in this way, we’ve probably developed the family’s capacity, because 

the man might not make those changes for a long time. But what we have the opportunity to do is to 

work with the family to build their capacity to keep each other safe and to address the issues that do 

arise. We are all facing the issues of poverty and alcohol abuse. As one woman was saying in the 

auditorium there, alcohol abuse is high. We’re also dealing with methamphetamine, and you just 

can’t deal with that stuff and work with people at a really comfortable level until they have at least 

gotten some treatment for it. 

So the intervention issue is huge. Right now, our tribes are talking about reintegrating the children 

back into the tribes, and what might that look like. I have to tell you that our tribes aren’t in any real 

solid position to be able to do that. One tribe alone has something like 250 children in state care. 

And that’s only one small tribe. 

Another issue is our collaboration across our communities. We not only have relationships with the 

prison, with Corrections and so forth, but also with other providers that we would normally probably 

have a different relationship with. Now we are involved with tutors in our community. They’re all 

very different tutors but the support that they provide to our community is exactly what’s needed 

for our families and all age groups. So we welcome them. There are a lot of criteria involved in 

running programs from the organisation and the community. 

For instance, if you want to do a Stopping Violence Program, then you’ve got to go through the 

Justice criteria, which are very heavy. And you’ve basically got to be a bloody professor just to put 

the proposal together. Then you’ve got to have all these credentials, and your life experience means 

zilch. Yet that’s the thing that connects you to the work that we’re doing, because we all have a 

passion for it. 

The other side to it is that the men we work with who come out of prison, all the partners to the 

women, come into our safe house. Basically they belong to the same population group in our 

communities. So we’re not talking about a different set of men who are from Mars or whatever they 

say and the women are from Venus. We’re talking about the same community. And so they have the 

same needs when they, for instance, come out of prison. Usually they’re left to just do whatever 

they want to do. But we know that if you’re just left to do whatever you want to do, you’re going to 

do what you know to do. And so we ensure that we’re right there before they even come out. We 

set them up with Safety Plans. We sit with them and discuss what it is that they desire, what they 

want to do, where they want to go, how they want to be, what they want to learn, what do they 

need to do. 

Basically we clear their pathway so they can come back to a community. And sometimes that’s a 

massive task. And it involves so many people. It might involve a number of Elders, it might involve 

other families who may have been wronged. The men can’t just walk back into the community 

without being known there. Otherwise what happens is that they go back to what they know. If you 

go back to a gang, at least you know you’re wanted. At least you don’t have to prove anything. The 




fact that you’ve been to gaol, therefore you’ve proven yourself. And that’s the sad thing. We don’t 

want that to happen to our people. 

Parekotuku: Just before we go to questions – what Ariana has just given is an explanation of 

integration. I think it’s important that we consider the idea she has raised – she has worked in 

integrated response, but there is still doubt that that actually works effectively. That’s a very 

powerful statement. We’ve committed more than 20 years of our lives towards an integrated 

response. And part of this process is that we’re still dealing with racism and a failure of response – 

and we’re committing our lives towards something that doesn’t always figure. We have to deal with 

Court systems that often judge us, not just because of the violence but because of the colour of our 

skin. We are still dealing with those sorts of issues of racism that impact on us, and we can’t 

guarantee that the police officer we get in a given situation has been adequately trained or 

responsive. 

Now that doesn’t mean to say we chuck everything out and say, “We don’t participate” because we 

still participate in an integrated response. What that means for our communities though is that we 

have to have two responses. We actually have to think about things really clearly, and when there is 

no system to protect us in our rural areas, we have to use our own tribal and community methods of 

protection. That’s about as real as you’re going to get. We’ve been working integrated responses for 

more than 20-odd years. 

I agree with one of the speakers this morning who said that integrated responses are not the end, 

but actually part of a process. And that’s all it is. Give it only the credibility that it has. One part of it 

is creating safety, but it has been so terrible in New Zealand over the last couple of years that the 

family services, the children’s services, now use an integrated response to remove children where 

violence exists. Now the response in New Zealand is that while it may have come from a good place 

of responsibility or trying to protect children, it has actually silenced many Maori women – many 

women, not just Maori – from actually utilising the system because the system’s response is often an 

overreaction. They take away the children. 

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t in many cases remove children if danger occurs. I’m saying 

that they have a one-trigger response, and it’s not always in the best interests of the children. You 

can’t tell me that taking away the children in those sort of situations is justified because the mother 

could not stop the violence happening to her, so therefore was unfit to be a mother. 

There is a whole history in this country about the removal of children, particularly for our Aboriginal 

brothers, and the devastation that that has created. We are now at tribal levels at home doing 

research around the impact of such work on our own families and our own people. And we never 

even experienced the processes of removing children, which happened in this country. You know, 

we put them in there for state care. And now we’re talking about the cycle of children who went into 

state care and who continue to be in the state services. 

So there are all kinds of issues. Best practice for us is about doing the right thing. And the traditional 

practices were the only ones that we could see because, as Ariana said, it was not a personal issue; it 

was a public matter. Accountability was not just about defending a law or a principle. It was about 

the protection of that woman and that future. 

We’ve failed in our country, and I think across the world, to do such longitudinal studies of the 

effects of violence. We think today that if we intervene and prevent more violence happening, we’ve 

solved the problem. I’m telling you that’s rubbish. If we could only measure the longitudinal effect of 

violence, you would see that many people cannot even go back into their communities. They’re 




dislodged from their whakapapa or their genealogy. They’re removed from that, and their power. So 

we blame our culture. But actually, when we look back in our culture – no! – our culture talked 

about the sanctity of women, the sanctity of children and our responsibility to care for the 

environment. 

We’re fortunate as Maori women that our best practice is that we have the opportunity to rely on 

and to recall a practice that our people still value. But we’ve got to regenerate those values and take 

responsibility again. We still use a systemic response, but we also apply very clear practices within 

our community. Because the violence is not going to end because the police are more engaged and 

the Courts are more engaged. It’s going to end when we as family, as people, take responsibility and 

say, “This is not going to happen to me, to my family and to my children”. And we work towards 

that. 

I applaud my sisters, Roni and Ariana, for having the patience every day, for the past 27 years, to 

work with violence toward their sisters, our women, and our children. Yet they still have the care 

now to think that they can change the behaviours of our men. And the whole vision around that is 

that they know then that every other response, putting them in prison, didn’t work. Not for them. 

And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use prisons as a method because prisons aren’t there for 

rehabilitation. Get that right. They were to protect us at home. “Take the Maori here, so I don’t have 

to deal with it.” It was never there for rehabilitation. But it can sometimes be a process by which 

people change their mindset. 

Workshop host: Thanks, Darrin, Ariana, Roni and Parekotuku. We’ve just got a couple of minutes for 

questions before we close. This has been a very powerful presentation. 

Male Speaker: Can you just tell me a little bit about H Town (Hamilton)? This is a wonderful 

presentation that you’ve brought with you. Can you tell me how that came about, and is it just for 

H Town? Is it a marketing tool that’s just developed around there? 

Roni: Some of the cards were produced by the Hamilton Abuse Intervention Project under a 

subsidiary of theirs, the Family Violence Technical Assistance Unit. 

So we wanted our own kinds of images. But the cards for H Town were done for our community. The 

advocates there on the front line would use some of those. And then we got better at the kind of 

imagery we wanted, and so you’ll see there are some differences in those resources. 

Female Speaker: I’m just wondering if you could tell me what role men are taking in the community 

to prevent violence? 

Female Speaker: Men in general, yes. We have quite a responsive community. And men in our 

community figure in most of the agencies working with families, whether it’s an agency called Family 

Start or others. We have a number of them. Then we’ve got some tribal agencies in our town. In the 

country, I have no idea what they are doing. 

Female Speaker: I work for the organisation, the National Network Stopping Violence Services, Te 

Kupenga Whakaoti Mahi Patunga. I’ve been in the role of Kaihautu for five years now. My 

professional and personal intention when I first began was to bring to the fore good Maori men. I 

come from a tribe that has always experienced good leadership by men. And so today, we have a 

number of Maori men who are leaders in their communities, either facilitating or supporting the 

developments of their own families. They’re involved in the White Ribbon Campaign, so you’ve seen 

some of the images of men here. It’s timely that they flash up when we’re talking about them. 




A number of cycle clubs around the country gather together for the White Ribbon Campaign. White 

Ribbon day and week in Aotearoa have certainly attracted a growing number of Maori men and non- 

Maori men in leadership roles in their communities. And we have tribal leaders who wear the white 

ribbon who speak out about violence intervention and prevention in their communities. There’s 

been massive increased visibility of men leading in the Stopping Violence work in Aotearoa. So that’s 

great. 

Male speaker: Thank you. Thank you for not only coming here, but also sharing an amazingly rich 

history. It’s been very precious. 

My question I guess is harder to answer than a couple of minutes, but I’m really intrigued about the 

double response: that there is room for a systems-based response to occur with or alongside a 

community-based response. And I wonder what that means in terms of individual and collective 

accountabilities, because a court/police/systems-based response is generally based on a model of 

individual accountability. I believe it’s important for a man to be responsible for his use of violence. 

Yet when there’s a community-based response, which is more around collective responsibility in a 

way that we’re all here as part of a community wanting to work towards the end of his violence, I 

guess my question is, what are the tensions between individual and collective accountabilities, and 

how do these tensions play out in practice? 

Darrin: It is very complex, how you utilise both processes and what’s happening. I think the 

community will determine whether it’s ready within itself to actually articulate its own response, so 

that’s the first one. And we do have some communities ready at home. In fact, I would say that 

probably the communities that are more ready are actually the Indigenous communities. 

The reason I say this is that we actually see the effects of violence more clearly. We understand the 

suffering of that a lot more than what might happen. Not to say that that doesn’t happen in non- 

Indigenous families, but it’s not always seen as an identified group. That’s my response to it. But as 

an identified group, we see it more clearly. 

As far as the individual response goes, we’re creating a change, and the first change is that in our 

community, in our society, the use of violence is not tolerable. And I suppose that when you take a 

response through the Courts or the justice system, it is still a collective position anyway, although 

the individual has to take responsibility for his behaviour. And I think it goes both ways. You have to 

own your own stuff, but also understand that it’s part and parcel of something else. 

Strange to say this but even in a country like New Zealand, people who might be part of a response 

like police, or even part of the judiciary, still use violence a lot as well. So you can practise one thing 

and still not be part of that change. It’s a constant challenge. 

One of the things that Ariana didn’t say about the years when we were part of an integrated 

response is that there is a big difference around what happened then and what happens now. Back 

in 1990, we as the community were part of monitoring the responses. We were paid by our 

government to monitor. We could tell you how many minutes it took for police to get a callout from 

here and arrive there. We could monitor how many times the police made it a male assault, a female 

charge, or common assault. So we could tell you exactly how many cases turned up in the Family 

Court that should have gone through the District Court. We could see how many convictions were 

made, and so on. 

It was only in the first two or three years that they allowed us to do that. The last 20 years, they 

haven’t allowed us to monitor them. So how can you have a system of accountability if we’re not 

part of monitoring its accountability? 




Our police will say to us, “It’s all right, Darrin, trust us, we’re monitoring ourselves”. It’s like, “Yeah, 

right”. And the judiciary is also saying, “We’re monitoring ourselves over here as well. It’s private, 

you can’t see what we’re doing”. 

Now if there’s anything that I can say to Australia around that stuff, it’s that it will never work. That’s 

why there is so much mistrust now between a system that’s supposed to be protective and 

defending us. We need to be part of monitoring that system. And when I say “we”, I’m talking about 

battered women, victims, and disadvantaged communities like ours. If we’re not monitoring the 

system, who are you accountable to? 

So that word “accountability” for me doesn’t ring true if you’re monitoring yourself. At the moment, 

they’re looking at economic measures, how expensive it is to do intervention. Our Domestic 

Violence Act only has two penalties: one is imprisonment and the other is being put on a program. 

So a woman in New Zealand would likely get her partner put on a program. And that’s okay for some 

change around there. But in New Zealand, you’re more likely to feel guilty about smoking in a public 

place than being a violent offender to women. 

We’ve got these priorities all wrong. You see, it costs our country so much money to deal with 

smoking and tobacco and cancer. The economic drivers drive more than what the change is. 

Parekotuku: I’d like to thank our presenters this morning. It really has been a privilege to have you 

with us, and thank you for travelling all this way. If I were to begin to talk about how instrumental 

each of them have been in changing the landscape of safety towards women and children in 

Aotearoa, then it would take way longer than the presentation. So they’re very humble in their 

presentation, and I think you’ve been very privileged this morning to hear them.

Kia Rangatira te Mahi – work of the Chiefs

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?