The Sunday Star Times carried an article on weekend entitled Crackdown on white collar family assualts.

The article announced that the the Government is planning a multi million dollar crackdown on Family violence. “..Including trying to combat the largely hidden problem of white collar domestic violence”

It goes on to talk about how Statistic New Zealand figures show arrests for reported domestic violence assaults by males on femaleshave increased dramatically in the last decade with abuse worsening in every ethic group.

Of course they include a neat little table in the article showing “The Numbers” .

Based on the numbers for the total of the charts Total domestic violence arrests by all enithicty categories is :

1997=5891
2006=7547

Thats a difference (in total) of 1656 arrests.

No effort is made to explain this increase, rather “Inspector Ged Byers , the police national family violence co-ordinator says there where 63000 domestic violence incidents last year, but experts believe the true figures are five times higher…..”

An incident is essentially a report of something to the police, a call. It tells us nothing of the actual occurrences of domestic violence. An incident is not an a crime – it cant become that until a charge is laid and the court process produces a guilty verdict. In fact it is likely that incidents are reported against multiple categories (sub catergories) The figure oft quoted is imeaninglessin providing a true picture of the extent of domestic violence in New Zealand.

As to the five time higher “expert claim” that is also a meaningless statement. No figures exist to support the claim. Its a myth nothing more as the figures do not support it.

Mr Byers should note the words of Lord Kelvin : ” I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.”

Also Mr Byers might like to fess up about the data problems being experienced by the Police as a result of the transition to a new computer system.

To quote

Changes made to police computer systems, during 2005/2006, have influenced the way in which crimes are recorded and counted. In particular, the migration from the Law Enforcement System2 (LES) to a new National Intelligence Application (NIA) appears to have influenced the recording and counting of crime since July 2005.

It is of note that there do not seem to be any nationally consistent practices governing
the recording of multiple offence statistics, which may have aggravated the impact of the computer system migration on crime statistics.

There appears to be a higher propensity to record offence statistics in the NIA system than there was in the LES system. This represents a change in statistics recording practice, not an increase in the level of criminal offending.

Enhancements integral to the NIA application architecture (e.g. wizard entry) and processes by which the organisation has adjusted to the NIA environment (training, data entry processes, file auditing and supervision) appear to have influenced the statistics capture.

The veracity of reporting figures is at the least questionable.But oh sorry that doesn’t fit the agenda does it Mr Byers.

Then we find out that in July a Waikato academic , one Neville Robertson is delivering a report to the Womens affair minister “with more than 50 recommendations aimed at making protection orders more effective”.

“His report is based on interviews with 43 women around the country who have taken out protection orders”

Once again I must question how this qualitative report can have any value. Figures from the Family Court website show about 24000 Final Orders made since 1998. So Nev has actually interviewed about 0.179% of the possible population of those who had a final order made. Based on this laughable sample size he is going to propose 50 changes to a significant piece of legislation.

The solution from Nev is ” New Zealand could learn from San Diego in the US , where they have a one stop shop for victims – somewhere women can get a protection order, emergency housing, police and other help, he said….. Robertson says some kiwis wrongly believe that any dad is better than no dad.”

I feel sad for kiwi kids, witch-doctors like Nev would have them de-fathered at any cost, as men are the cause of all domestic violence.

I suggest that real science shows a different picture then Nev suggests :

This research used a sample of 360 couples from the Dunedin Longitudinal Study to analyse aspects of intimate partner abuse. The researchers found that both males and females were perpetrators of abuse. The personal characteristics of both the male and female in the couple were found to increase the likelihood of partner abuse. The findings suggest that domestic violence interventions aimed solely at treating the male as the perpetrator may not succeed in reducing the incidence of abuse. Therefore, intimate partner abuse prevention programmes should target males and females as both perpetrators and victims of abuse.

Its official witch – doctoring and spin doctoring are the basis of policy making on domestic violence. Its easier to make money out of misery than to seek to remove the causes. I wonder how much Mr Byers and Nev make each year out of the domestic violence industry?

Regards

Scrap