Shine on the Family Violence Death Review Committee findings

The Family Violence Death Review Committee has today released their latest report outlining disturbing findings from the data collated during the years of 2009 to 2015. Gathered from three main types of family violence death categories – intimate partner violence, child abuse and neglect and intrafamilial violence.

Shine’s on the ground experience working with victims of domestic violence relates well to the statistics in the report outlining the intimate partner violence deaths. The report found that there were 194 family violence deaths over seven years, with intimate partner violence deaths making up almost half of these deaths. Of the 92 deceased, men were three-quarters of offenders and women were two-thirds of those who were killed.

When the abuse histories in the relationships were examined, gendered patterns of harm were even more defined, with 83 of the 92 people who died had events of abuse in their history.

Of the 83 victims of death, 82 were women and the predominant aggressors were nearly all men, at 81 men out of 83 total. Ninety-eight percent of intimate partner death events with a recorded history of abuse involved men who abused their female partners.

“This report clarifies that women are the victims of almost all of the partner violence that causes fear, serious injury and death. This is also the on-the-ground experience of agencies like Shine, where we work with seriously injured women every week who could well have become another statistic in this report.

Many New Zealanders believe that women and men perpetrate partner violence equally because of conclusions drawn from the Otago study, but that study was not looking at fear, serious injury and death, and it was not viewing partner violence as a pattern of coercive control. As a society we need to understand the relationship of gender and domestic violence so that we can more quickly and effectively stop it from happening,” says Jill Proudfoot, Shine Client Services Manager

The numbers detailed in the report are a stark and unacceptable reminder of the histories of harm and the human cost of family violence and violence that occurs within families every day in New Zealand.