Shine's response to new family violence offences

Today Prime Minister John Key announced a raft of changes in a speech to justice sector groups in Wellington.

In response to the announced changes, Shine’s General Manager Jane Drumm says;

“We are thrilled with all of the changes announced by the Government today. There are so many barriers to safety for victims of domestic abuse in our current justice system, and it is heartening that the Government is continuing to address these barriers with much needed law and policy changes.”

“It has been a major problem until now that there has been no way to identify and track family violence offences through the court. Historically, the charge Male Assaults Female (MAF) has frequently been used as an indicator of the prevalence of family violence cases being heard in our criminal courts. But this misses all the cases where that charge is downgraded to Common Assault, all cases where the charge may be more serious than MAF, e.g. Intent to Injure. It also misses cases where family violence assault is something other than a male assaulting a female.

“Creating a flag for all family violence offences on criminal records will go a very long way towards helping us to understand the prevalence of family violence related cases in our court system, and see trends relating to how these cases are resolved,” says Drumm. “This is critical – we are fundamentally hampered in effectively addressing the issue of family violence if we cannot get a good picture of how we are dealing with it.”

All too often, the existence of protection orders in sentencing for a family violence related offence has been completely ignored. In other words, the sentence would have been the same whether or not a protection order was in place.

Drumm says, “We are thrilled with any changes that will mean protection orders are taken more seriously and better enforced by our criminal justice system.”

“A cost of $32.5 million per year for the next four years is not a lot to improve our justice system and ultimately save lives.

“In 2003-04, it cost $3.9 million for police to investigate a homicide. And the final bill to taxpayers for the Mark Lundy case was more than $6 million. The economic cost of family violence in NZ was over $4.1 billion in 2014.”

ends

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