Practice: the New Zealand Corrections Journal, 2018, 6(2). Open access

"The violence is normal, the drugs is normal, the crime is all normal and that’s my life, how I’ve lived for 24 years, how I was raised, how all my family are, generations, and generations, and generations.”

“My dad used to beat me up, my dad used to beat my mum up, and I just thought it was normal just to beat people up if they make you angry. But now I realise it’s not.”

In 2017/18 over 10,000 people started Corrections’ managed sentences where the lead offence was family violence. In August 2018, 26.5% of the current prison muster were serving sentences for family violence offences. Family violence is therefore a key area of focus for the Department. Despite a plethora of research on family violence over the past decade, comparatively little attention has focused specifically on family violence perpetrators (Centre for Innovative Justice, 2015; Polaschek, 2016; Morrison et al 2015). As a consequence, our understanding of people’s pathways into family violence offending, the relationship between family violence and other general forms of offending, and the crossover between intimate partner violence perpetration and broader forms of family violence is limited. Knowledge of people’s treatment pathways is also lacking (see Morrison et al 2015).

Launched in 2017, the family violence perpetrator research project started to address these gaps. Specifically, the research investigated people’s pathways into family violence and the relationship between the onset of other offending and family violence perpetration. It examined the overlap of intimate partner violence (IPV) with more general forms of family violence, and sought to understand how family violence perpetration changed across time and different relationships. In doing so, it explored the distal and proximate factors which people believed contributed to their behaviour. In a context where there is no record of who has attended family violence programmes across different government agency referral pathways, the research explored where and how people first received treatment and the nature, dosage and perceived effectiveness of the treatment(s) received. Through the perspective of participants, it examined what aspects of treatment were useful (and which aspects were less so) and gaps in existing service provision. The research also examined people’s views about desistance, and, crucially, what they felt would help or hinder their attempts to desist from family violence. In doing so, the research makes an important original contribution to our knowledge of family violence in New Zealand and identifies promising directions for service development. (Introduction). Record #6114