Rau rangatira mā, tēnei te mihi ki a koutou i runga i te kaupapa o te rā – mana wahine. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā ra tātau katoa.

It is a pleasure to be with you again today – but this time, for the first time, in my capacity as Minister of Women’s Affairs. I’m delighted to be here and I congratulate everyone at Zonta and UNIFEM for their work and for organising this wonderful event.

I am pleased that the proceeds from tickets for this breakfast are going to support gender equality in leadership and decision-making in a Pacific nation. I look forward to Jackie Edmonds telling us shortly about her experiences in the Marshall Islands and the work that UNIFEM is funding there.

I feel it’s very appropriate to talk to you today about what I think are two of the biggest issues for New Zealand women – family violence and sexual abuse. Unfortunately New Zealand has an appalling record in these areas, and the Labour-led government is working hard with local communities and non government organisations to try to turn this around.

It takes a long time to change attitudes and trends of domestic violence or sexual abuse and that’s why collaboration is so important from all sides. Our government leads this work, but change has to be brought about also through organisations like yours, community groups, schools; everyone in our society must join us to make the change.

Sexual violence statistics are shocking – 20 per cent of New Zealand women and 5 per cent of New Zealand men have experienced sexual interference or assault at some time in their lives.

Women are overwhelmingly the primary victims of family violence – one in four women have experienced violence at the hands of a male partner at some stage in their lifetime. Between 2000 and 2004, 45 women were murdered by their male partner or ex-partner, which is deeply upsetting and concerning.

It’s not ok

The Labour-led government is working hard to try to change attitudes towards family violence. We have just launched the second phase of the ‘Campaign for Action on Family Violence’. This involves TV ads in which men who have been violent to their partners or whanau in the past talk about how they were able to change their behaviour.

These men have been very courageous to come on national TV and own up to their abusive past, and it’s through people like this that others will be inspired to change their behaviour also.

This campaign, which was originally launched last September, has already been successful in raising awareness that family violence is not ok – it’s a personal responsibility and a community responsibility.

A survey at the end of last year found that nine out of ten people remembered the first set of ads of the ‘It’s not ok’ campaign, and more than half of these people had discussed the campaign with others or taken action as a result. This is great news, but we need to keep up the effort to change more attitudes.

We need high impact campaigns like this if we are to change hearts and minds, but we also need to do the hard work behind the scenes to change the things that make it hard for victims to go and get help, and hard for offenders to accept responsibility and to change their behaviour.

Everyone sees the television ads, but far fewer people are aware of the range and depth of the work being undertaken by the Taskforce for Action on Violence within Families or by the Taskforce for Action on Sexual Violence.

Ministry of Women’s Affairs research

I’m not going to try to cover those programmes here, but I think it is worth talking briefly about one major piece of work being undertaken by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to show our determination to create change, and to make a difference for some of our most vulnerable women – and men.

This work relates to issues that have been very prominent in the media over the past year or so:
• The high personal cost to victims of bringing rape complaints
• The very low conviction rate for rape
• And the consequent re-victimisation of some women.

These are not new problems. The ‘2006 New Zealand Crime and Safety Survey’ estimated that only nine percent of sexual violence offences are reported to the police.

This is not just a New Zealand problem – in the UK, the chance of getting a conviction for sexual violence is less than 6 per cent.

We don’t know what the conviction rate is in New Zealand – so we need better information on the size of this problem and why reporting and conviction rates are so low. Once we find this out, we can figure out how to bring about change.

The Ministry of Women’s Affairs has been seeking answers to these questions, with vital support from other agencies, like the Police and the Ministry of Justice. This research started about six months ago, and will continue for two years.

It is still very early days, so I can’t give you results, but I can tell you that there are four main areas of research that we hope will give us a much better understanding of why the system is failing so many victims, and what might be done to improve things.

1) Support services

The first area of work is a survey of people who work with victims of sexual violence to get better information on the ability of our services to respond to their needs. Some reasons that deter victims from reporting sexual violence include lack of confidentiality and inaccessible services. In-depth case-studies will find out the impact of these factors on the reporting of sexual violence.

2) Seeking help

The second area of work involves interviewing victims of sexual violence to try to understand what influenced their decision to seek help or not to seek help.

3) Conviction rates

The third work stream aims to uncover and properly analyse attrition and conviction rates for sexual violation cases in New Zealand. That involves analysis of existing information that has been collected, but not yet collated, in a form that gives us a useful national picture of how difficult it is to prosecute and convict.

4) International research

And finally we are interested in whether we can learn from other countries that might be better at looking after the victims of sexual violence. We will review international and New Zealand research on best practice in victim support, and the challenges to implementing this in New Zealand.

New Zealand progress – more to do

New Zealand women have made great progress in recent decades, but we still have a long way to go to improve our record on family violence and sexual abuse. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs research focuses on why so many women are victimised and why it’s so hard for them to get justice. This is the area that we need to focus attention on at the moment.

We can’t develop better policies and deliver better services unless we understand the causes and the barriers to change.

I’m hugely encouraged by this work and by the many community projects and programmes that collectively work to change attitudes to sexual violence by making it easier to report, prosecute, convict and ultimately make offenders responsible for their actions.

We also recognise the many groups, organisations and individuals that work in communities to speak out, challenge, support and create waves of change – we need these champions.

The government acknowledges the vital role that non-government organisations and communities play, and the Prime Minister recently announced $446 million over four years to give these groups secure funding to provide social services in areas such as family violence.

Conclusion

I believe we can make family violence a thing of the past because, as women, we have already demonstrated we can change the world in other ways.

International Women’s Day is ultimately a celebration. We can be proud of the areas that are clearly making progress – such as paid parental leave or better early childhood education, or getting women on to state sector boards.

We also know that if change was possible there, then it is also possible to work towards a New Zealand in which women are safe and the next generation will not have to suffer the impacts of family and sexual violence.

Until we make a difference to attitudes about sexual and family violence we will still have women who are unable to contribute to family life, community life and nation building.

The solutions may not be easy or quick, but making positive change never is. International Women’s Day this year rightly focuses on women’s development and how putting resources into women’s development makes a difference.

I want to be part of making that difference and I know you do too.

Thank you