Interview with Te Whare Pounamu Dunedin Women's Refuge

An Authentically Intersectional Institution: Te Whare Pounamu Dunedin Women’s Refuge – An Interview with Wenda Parata-Muir

As of 2017, New Zealand had the worst rates of family violence in the developed world, with 1 in every 3 women having experienced some form of domestic violence in their lifetime. Te Whare Pounamu Dunedin Women’s Refuge (TWP) exists to assist women, children, families and whanau to escape domestic violence, through providing short-term residential housing to affected women, and through offering programmes to women, children and men enabling them to understand the cycle of domestic violence and how to escape it.

As Manager Wenda Parata-Muir states, the 5-week programme offered to women is “to empower them to take responsibility for their safety and that of their children. Many women find it helpful to attend a group run especially for women who have experienced family harm and intimate partner violence. In the programme they learn about what violence is, its effects, and how to keep safe, they begin to find themselves again and share experiences with other women who have been through similar things. This breaks their isolation.” An example of one of the tools used at TWP is the power and control wheel, pictured above, which is also utilized in men’s programmes across the country.

TWP also offers programmes to children “based on feelings, thoughts and behaviours.” TWP creates a safe environment where children are encouraged to share their feelings and where they’re taught that violence in the family is not their fault. Safety planning is also conducted, for example through consultation with schools, grandparents and the police. TWP also assists in family group conferences, the Family Court, the District court, with Police interviews, in Work & Income meetings and applications for protection orders.

The History

The Dunedin Women’s Refuge was established in 1973, with the Dunedin chapter coming out of the Dunedin Collective for Women (active in the 1970s-80s). Members Yoko Neuman, Annie Tuck, Juanita Ketchel and Marianne Quinn recognized that there was a need not being fulfilled in Dunedin – that women were being abused and receiving little to no support. To even talk about domestic violence was taboo. In Parata –Muir’s words, one would be “frowned upon, scorned upon.”

The attitude was one of denial, with Dunedin’s mayor in 1976 announcing “these things don’t happen in Dunedin.” The Police didn’t want to get involved; the medical sector lacked training in how to deal with instances of battering and many women’s complaints were trivialized or discredited - doctors would even advise women to return to their husband after instances of domestic violence and even refuse to treat them unless they returned to their abusive partner. It was difficult for women to obtain protection orders and difficult for them to have access to matrimonial property unless they engaged in a long, drawn-out legal process. Domestic violence was seen as a private issue that should be dealt with in the home, with the husband being the master of the household and his wife belonging to him.

We have seen a massive cultural shift regarding domestic violence since the 1970s, largely due to organisations such as TWP and the commitment and determination of a small group of women who established this necessary social service with very little or no financial or social support. For example, TWP now receives around 50% of its funding from the Government, it experiences significant support from the local Dunedin community and now has a “voice at the table” in terms of operating as a recognised non-governmental organisation in New Zealand.

However, despite being such an essential service it still faces significant challenges. Accessing adequate housing in Dunedin has become a significant issue for its users, meaning they are staying for longer periods at the TWP residences. Due to this, women now “have to have had some form of domestic violence happen in order to stay at TWP.” The organisation is also significantly under-resourced, having to raise 40-50% of its own funds every year. To paint a picture of this reality, Parata-Muir states, “It costs $260 odd dollars to keep an inmate in prison for a day in Dunedin. For our residential occupants we get funded $1.50 a day.” Workload is also a big issue for TWP. The organisation gets paid to follow up on 98 police incident reports a year, but tend to follow up on 1,300 per year. As a result employees often end up working volunteer hours on top of their paid work.

While our approach to domestic violence has certainly changed since the 1970s, we still have a long way to go in terms of facilitating the essential work of organisations attending to this significant social issue in New Zealand.

An Intersectional Feminist Approach

Although they don’t use the term ‘intersectional feminism’, TWP is very intersectional in its approach.

Te Whare Pounamu was itself conceptualized in about 1985 because “a group of Wahine Maori students from Otago University were on the Collective of Dunedin Women’s Refuge and felt that the needs of Maori Whanau were not being met. They decided to leave the Dunedin Women’s Refuge Collective and start out on their own journey enculturing the needs of Whanau. This was a direct response from the community. They started a new Collective and named it Te Whare Pounamu.” The two organisations eventually merged to make Te Whare Pounamu Dunedin Women’s Refuge.

This history has led to the organisation taking a very intersectional approach to its work. For example, TWP offers decolonization workshops to their staff. The national constitution for the Women’s Refuge organisation recognizes tangata whenua as people being of this land and the organisation wants its staff to understand “the impact colonization has had and the impact of the Treaty.” Wenda considers the impact of colonization to be huge – “You just need to look at the chronology of this country, the Native Land Act being abolished, language being taken out of school, land deals over handshakes… the process of assimilation has isolated the Maori language and led to a breakdown of hapu, iwi and whanau because Maori people were not allowed to live collectively under colonialism.” This feeds into the work of TWP as “if we have to work in a non-judgmental role, we have to understand the history that comes along with abuse.” TWP is also guided by Te Tiriti o Waitangi, with 13 of 45 refuges operating especially for Maori and all refuges operating according to kaupapa Maori.

TWP also offers culturally specific assistance and programmes to women. For example, it offers assistance and programmes specifically tailored for Maori and Pasifika women, for older women, for LGBTQI+ women and for women with disabilities. It’s associate organisation, Shakti, also offers culturally appropriate services to migrant women.

Finally, TWP’s intersectional ethos is also reflected in the four cornerstones that underpin the movement. These are ‘takatapuhi nurturing diversity’ (indicating the organisations support for the LGBTQI+ community), parallel development, collectivism and feminism. Parallel development “recognises Tangata Whenua and all other ethnicities, and Collectivism is everybody having a voice at that table, especially in decision making processes.”

Finally, feminism recognises that domestic violence is a gendered issue that predominantly affects women and children. This reality is further discussed in Fran J. Cammock’s thesis on the establishment of the Dunedin Women’s Refuge, where she states that “Family violence is a symptom of the larger problem of inequitable power relations in society" (A History of the Establishment of Dunedin Women's Refuge 1976-1977, by Fran J. Cammock, November 1994, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the University of Otago degree of Bachelor of Arts Honours in History, p. 65). Similarly, Dr Ang Jury (New Zealand Women’s Refuge Chief Executive) considers that gender inequality in our society is a major contributing factor to domestic violence rates in this country. She states, “If you look at countries like Sweden or Norway, countries that put a lot of effort into gender equality, their rates of domestic violence are much lower. It seems to me that if we’re going to make a difference, we have to get serious about women’s position in New Zealand" (Dr. Ang Jury, 'Family violence: 525,000 New Zealanders harmed every year', New Zealand Herald, 26 March 2017, here).

These statements consider that domestic violence and gender equality in New Zealand are two closely related issues. To fully attend to the damage and tragedy that domestic violence causes in this country, we need to see it within a larger context of gender inequality in New Zealand which at its worst produces tragic results, breaking down families and whanau and destroying the lives of women, children and men.