New approach looks at financial literacy to help stop domestic violence

A Pacific community health service is implementing a new domestic violence programme that challenges the conventional approach for dealing with victims of abuse.

Vaka Tautua is based in Manukau and its new programme will be based at a number of places within the Auckland region.

The Growing Family Resilience after Violence programme is funded by the Ministry of Social Development, and is set to start later this year.

The programme is modelled on an initiative Vaka Tautua employed amongst the Pacific community earlier this year that dealt with families with disabilities.

The new service aims to focus on financial issues within Pacific households as a starting point for domestic violence recovery.

CEO of Vaka Tautua, Vui Mark Gosche, said the idea of using a financial literacy programme would open doors to “prepare families to deal with its own issues around family violence”.

“It’s all about being a family, sitting around the table together, initially to talk about financial stuff but what it leads to is dealing with all the other issues families are contending with.”

Mr Gosche said the programme would offer Pacific families the skills to deal with large debt and ways to meet their weekly bills.

“Often people are under financial stress and there can be all sorts of negative outcomes. From that, one of the outcomes can be family violence.”

Mr Gosche said the programme is not offering a crisis management situation, but will be taking referred families from organisations that are “at the next stage” after domestic violence has occurred.

Mangere Budgeting Service Trust CEO, Darryl Evans, said he applauded the programme’s focus on financial issues but “it’s not the only thing they should be focusing on”.

“You have to look at every aspect that is going on in the house,” said Mr Evans.

He said he knows from experience as a budgeting adviser having no money is extremely stressful, and a lot of the issues stem from drug and alcohol abuse and dependency.

Domestic abuse charity Shine’s client service director, Jill Proudfoot, said financial stress or alcohol is not the cause of domestic violence and that “it’s about one person in the household being in control”.

“If domestic violence was caused by financial stress then everyone who is poor will beat up their wives, but that’s not the case,” said Ms Proudfoot.

She believes clarity about the causes of family violence is essential in regards to the programme becoming a success.

However, Ms Proudfoot still agreed with the ethos of the programme and thought it was an “excellent idea”.