Te Reo is a taonga inherited from our tūpuna. It is a source of enlightenment and innovation connected with our mātauranga, carrying clues about the way our tūpuna understood and experienced the world. The acquisition, maintenance, promotion and revival of te reo Māori must be a priority.
We haven’t used a lot of te reo on this website, but we hope to offer more.
Manaakitanga provides us with opportunities to engage with people, individually and collectively. We need to ensure that all of our activities are conducted in ways that enhance the mana of all those involved, and reflect values such as generosity, fairness, respect and consideration. A favourable view by others suggests the presence of manaakitanga.
The approach in this website considers the wellbeing of everyone involved, including people harmed, people causing harm, and community members. No-one is disposable.
Ūkaipōtanga reinforces the marae as our principal home, as a place of comfort, nourishment and inspiration. The marae is of primary importance in reconnecting with mātauranga from our own whānau, hapū and iwi. We should ensure that we are engaged with our marae and endeavour to create a similar environment at Te Wānanga o Raukawa.
The approach in this website encourages communities to take responsibility for violence and for ending violence. The result will be stronger, healthier communities.
Kotahitanga values working together, with energy and enthusiasm, towards common goals. We should celebrate our distinctiveness, as an institution and as individuals, whānau, hapū and iwi; while also revelling in our shared experiences, understandings, philosophies and interests.
The approach in this website draws from and builds experience at setting goals and working together to achieve them.
Whanaungatanga reminds us that our achievements are typically the result of collaborative effort. The full potential of our work is realised through working together as a whānau, which encourages us to celebrate our common interests, applaud our diversity and reinforce our connections with whānau, hapū and iwi.
The approach in this website builds and uses connections, working together to end violence.
Whakapapa reinforces the connections between all of us, and to our tūpuna, atua and tūrangawaewae. Whakapapa shapes our endeavours to understand and contribute to the mātauranga continuum that binds us to one another across the generations.
The approach in this website re-connects with tikanga around communities and violence. It aims to support communities to return to skills from previous generations for looking after ourselves, so that future generations can continue to build on those skills.
Wairuatanga acknowledges the importance of the spiritual dimension in our lives and in mātauranga. Wairuatanga recognises the interdependence between present, past and future generations in the discovery, reclamation, rejuvenation and expansion of the mātauranga continuum.
Responding to and ending violence is restoring tikanga for future generations. That means challenging what some of us consider normal. This work is important and should not be rushed—real change takes time.
Pūkengatanga dictates the pursuit of excellence in all our activities and stipulates that we should build on the fields of expertise for which we are presently known. We need to contribute to the expansion of mātauranga with confidence, based on our own experiences. We must strive to provide distinctive, innovative and quality programmes, publications and services.
The approach in this website builds on the understanding and skills of people affected by violence to make themselves safer.
Rangatiratanga requires us to behave in ways that attract favourable comment from others, to the extent that we might be considered to have attributes commonly associated with a rangatira. We must nurture and promote these characteristics. We must be confident and competent in the way that we do our work, exercising control and discipline to ensure the integrity of our pursuits.
The approach in this website grows skills among ourselves, strengthening communities’ ability to manage their matters without relying on the state or social services.
Kaitiakitanga requires Te Wānanga o Raukawa to nurture and protect its people and its place; and to preserve and enrich our inheritance from generations past. It demands that we employ our resources wisely, ensuring that their utilisation contributes to our viability and reputation.
The approach in this website turns to community solutions more common in past generations in order to build safety for future generations.
Te Wānanga o Raukawa
This website is a koha from Te Wānanga o Raukawa to support people ending violence.
Te Wānanga o Raukawa is a tikanga Māori tertiary education provider based in Ōtaki, Aotearoa. It was established in 1981 by the Raukawa Marae Trustees under the principles of the iwi development strategy, Whakatupuranga Rua Mano: Generation 2000. Whakatupuranga Rua Mano captured the health and wellbeing aspirations of the ART Confederation of Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa ki Whakarongotai and Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga, the founding iwi of Te Wānanga o Raukawa.
The four founding principles of Whakatupuranga Rua Mano were:
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Our people are our wealth: develop and retain
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Te reo is a taonga: halt the decline and revive
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The marae is our principle home: maintain and respect
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Self-determination: find opportunities to advance our aspirations.
This project was started to support communities based on the Wānanga experience with Te Kawa o te Ako. Te Kawa o te Ako requires everyone at the wānanga to be responsible for their behaviour, in particular any behaviour that affects the learning and teaching potential of staff and students. If someone’s behaviour makes it harder for them or others to learn or teach, that behaviour needs to stop, and they might need to show that they can be trusted in future.
All activities of Te Wānanga o Raukawa are guided by a set of kaupapa or principles.
Guiding kaupapa and their expression
About the Toolkit
“… the process of reversing the violence and traumatic events of the past two hundred years will take time. . . . The question is: what steps will we take, here and now, to create a platform upon which our children and grandchildren can build?”
Ani Mikaere
“Our goal is not ending violence. It is liberation.”
Beth Richie
Creative Interventions (CI) started in 2004 in Oakland, California as a national resource centre to create and promote community-based interventions to interpersonal violence. Its founders worked with survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault for many years but found limitations in the mainstream US approach to working with violence. CI uses experience and knowledge to support everyday people to challenge and overcome violence.
CI developed a community-based approach to end interpersonal violence. Organisations that work on domestic violence and sexual assault usually treat it as an individual problem that can be solved with counselling and individual support, or rely on the police and criminal system. CI instead turned to communities, and to supporting community-based resistance to violence in all its forms.
A community-based approach means everyday people taking action together to end violence. Those people could be whānau, friends, neighbours, co-workers, members of community organisations and sports clubs, anyone affected by violence or who wants to stop it.
CI was inspired by a social movement that the US group Incite! Women of Color against Violence came out of in 2000. Over a thousand people, mostly from communities of colour, gathered at the first Color of Violence conference in California looking for responses to violence that were safer and more effective than policing and prisons.
Another organisation, Critical Resistance, came out of a 1998 conference attended by thousands committed to prison abolition. Their joint statement on gender violence and the Prison Industrial Complex inspired many communities to rethink their responses to violence, prison and policing.
The Incite! and Critical Resistance statement begins:
“We call on social justice movements to develop strategies and analysis that address both state AND interpersonal violence, particularly violence against women. Currently, activists/ movements that address state violence (such as anti-prison, anti-police brutality groups) often work in isolation from activists/ movements that address domestic and sexual violence. The result is that women of color, who suffer disproportionately from both state and interpersonal violence, have become marginalized within these movements. It is critical that we develop responses to gender violence that do not depend on a sexist, racist, classist, and homophobic criminal justice system. It is also important that we develop strategies that challenge the criminal justice system and that also provide safety for survivors of sexual and domestic violence. To live violence free-lives, we must develop holistic strategies for addressing violence that speak to the intersection of all forms of oppression.”
In the spirit of that statement and in honour of the many who have resisted violence over the generations, CI started an organisation that would exist just long enough to create resources to support this work. They produced the Creative Interventions toolkit: A practical guide to stop interpersonal violence. After writing their toolkit, CI ended as an organisation. Its members now focus on ways to support a community-based response to violence that truly relies on local communities, from informal friendship networks to community institutions such as faith institutions, sports clubs, unions or community.
The short lifespan of the organisation was planned to:
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Keep the focus on the community-based project rather than on the survival of CI
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Allow for risk-taking within the organisation (since many of the concepts and practices of CI are considered experimental, controversial and risky) rather than protecting the reputation of CI.
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The original toolkit came from a 3-year period from 2006 to 2009 when CI joined with partner organisations in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Asian Women’s Shelter, Shimtuh, Narika, and La Clinica de la Raza and others (a full list of contributors is in the toolkit).
These organisations worked together to create an approach to domestic violence and sexual assault. All had years of experience working in mostly immigrant communities on these issues, and wanted to create options for people experiencing violence, especially for people who couldn’t or didn’t want to turn to the State. CI wanted to know:
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How can family members, friends, neighbours, co-workers and community members act to end violence that people they care about are experiencing? In the toolkit these are community allies (you might have heard them called bystanders or social networks).
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How can we use our connection and care for people who are harmed by violence to provide safety and community?
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How can we provide greater safety for people harmed by violence, whether or not they stay with or need to be around the people who have harmed them?
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How can we get people who are causing harm to stop, repair the damage they have done, and change their behaviour so that they become part of the solution?
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How can we change violent behaviour by using our connection and care for people who have caused harm, rather than by using threats, punishment or policing?
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How can we change common beliefs, practices and skills to respond to, end and prevent violence?
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How can we use all of the above to create the safe, respectful and healthy communities that we want?
These questions called for a new approach to interpersonal violence.
CI called this project the Community-based interventions project. The aim was to create a new vision for violence intervention, to work with people experiencing violence, and to develop a model and tools from that work.
From the beginning, CI offered a community-based approach. It mostly involved asking questions that would lead people to find the resources they needed among their own friends, family and community, and find answers from what they knew about their situation of violence, their values and their goals.
CI answered requests from people dealing with interpersonal violence who wanted something different from other domestic violence or sexual assault services. CI worked together with them to find the ideas, tools and lessons in this toolkit guided by questions and values. It was experimental. Each situation was unique. But some key questions led to responses that fit their values and needs. The people coming to CI worked out what they wanted and needed without being told what they should do. They found support in friends and family members coming together to think about their situation of violence and to create strategies for change.
CI helped by asking questions and guiding a process for people to come up with their own responses and resources. Instead of telling people what they should do, CI were helping people find their own expertise within a confusing and emotional situation. It is a facilitated model.
This involved:
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Self-reflection and clarification (What is going on?)
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Thinking about safety (How do you stay safe?)
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Finding help among friends, family and community (Who can help?)
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Working out goals (What do you want?)
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Supporting people who were harmed (How do you support the person who was harmed?)
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Thinking about what they wanted from the person doing harm (How do you support the person who caused harm to take accountability?)
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Finding ways to work collectively with their community (How do you work together?)
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Moving through what could be a long and winding process towards their goals (How are you doing?).
The CI toolkit that this website is based on is the result of that project. It contains the model CI built together with partners and those who sought help. It includes tips and information. We expect that it will be used and improved on by all of you in your own situations of violence and your own communities.
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This website is a collaboration between Te Wānanga o Raukawa and Creative Interventions.
It is based on the Creative Interventions toolkit: A practical guide to stop interpersonal violence.
“The people are our wealth”
The purpose of Te Wānanga o Raukawa is to contribute to the survival of Māori as a people.
Colonisation brought high rates of trauma and interpersonal violence, and the State has attacked Māori sources of safety and healing: tikanga and whānau (see He Whaipaanga Hou). Interpersonal violence is now heartbreakingly common.
When the State’s criminal system (police, courts and prisons) is the only way to respond to violence, there are a number of effects:
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We lose faith in ourselves to solve problems
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Relying on the State makes it stronger, reinforcing colonisation and undermining tikanga
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People who are being hurt do nothing about the violence because reporting it doesn’t help them—it often makes things worse, by bringing the State into their lives, destroying the life of the person hurting them (who may be their parent, their partner, or someone else they rely on and care about), and taking away the support they get from that person as well as their whānau and friends
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People who are causing harm do nothing about their violence because the risks of admitting it (criminal conviction, risking job, access to children) are too great
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Communities do nothing about violence, or side with the person causing harm to protect them from the criminal system.
All of this makes our communities less safe, and makes it harder for people to get the support they need.
Communities can’t heal while violence is still common. Healing and decolonisation in Māori communities means stopping violence, disentangling ourselves from the State and re-connecting with tikanga (see Transforming Whānau Violence). We need ways to respond to violence that strengthen our communities.
As a product of Whakatupuranga Rua Mano, Te Wānanga o Raukawa is committed to the well-being of its people and to rangatiratanga (self-determination). Te Kawa o te Ako has been Te Wānanga o Raukawa’s response to problems including interpersonal violence.
We hope this website will help your community find its own solutions.
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A community is behind this website and the toolkit it is based on.
This website is a collaboration between Te Wānanga o Raukawa and Creative Interventions. Additional support has come from Fulbright New Zealand and the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board.
The partner organisations towards the creation of the toolkit were:
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Incite! Women of Color against Violence (National). Creative Interventions is an affiliate of Incite! and came out of the social movement that Incite! represents
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Creative Interventions (Oakland, CA) (with many, many individual supporters—volunteers, board members, advisory board members, staff, organisational partners, large and small funders)
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Asian Women’s Shelter (Oakland, CA)
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Narika (Oakland, CA)
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Shimtuh, a project of Korean Community Center of the East Bay (KCCEB) (Oakland, CA)
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La Clinica de la Raza (Oakland, CA)
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StoryTelling & Organizing Project (STOP) (National). STOP is a spin-off project of Creative Interventions and is working with community organisations to promote community-based responses to violence through story-telling, and organising around successful strategies for communities to challenge violence in all of its
Many more people and organisations supported the toolkit, and are acknowledged there
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This website is for anyone who wants to try a community-based approach to respond to and end violence (what we call an intervention). You do not need to be trained professionals. Any and all of us involved in or affected by violence can be part of solutions to violence.
People connected to the situation of violence
Person harmed (survivor or victim)
Are you someone who is directly hurt by violence? The harm can be physical, emotional or verbal, sexual, financial and other (see Basics about violence).
Other people may also be harmed by direct violence, indirect harm resulting from violence, or threatened violence:
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children
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whānau members
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household members, like boarders or flatmates
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partners
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friends
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neighbours
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co-workers.
There is a section of this website with information and tools for the person harmed.
Ally or community ally
Are you a friend, whanaunga, team mate, neighbour, co-worker, or community member who is connected to someone being harmed? Are you close to or connected to someone who is causing harm? Were you called in to help with a situation of violence?
There is a section of this website with information and tools for allies.
Person doing harm
Are you harming others, now or in the past? Have you been accused of harming others by someone?
There is a section of this website with information and tools for the person causing harm.
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It is sometimes hard to tell who is mostly causing harm and who is mostly being harmed.
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Even when one person is causing harm, the person hurt is often blamed by them and others. They may also blame themselves for causing the abuse, or think things they do are as bad as the abusive behaviour. Women in particular are often expected to take responsibility for problems in their relationships and taught to blame themselves.
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Each person may have been violent with the other, but there is a clear difference in power. One person’s violence may be much less harmful than the other’s, or their violence may be self-defence. The person most harmed or using violence in self-defence is the person harmed; the person most responsible for harm is the person doing harm.
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Very rarely there is mutual abuse or violence, where power in the relationship is somewhat equal, and each is as likely as the other to be abusive and cause harm.
These questions can help work out what is going on:
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Who is more afraid?
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Who starts the violence?
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Who ends up getting harmed?
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Who is changing and adapting to meet the other’s needs or moods?
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Who is more vulnerable?
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Who is using violence for power and control (abusive violence)? Who is using violence to try to get safety or integrity in a violent situation (self-defence)?
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Who always has to win?
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This website is for situations where one person is more responsible for violence with more power to abuse. It is not for situations of mutual abuse where there is shared power and vulnerability. In situations of mutual abuse or violence, mediation or relationship counselling may be more appropriate (mediation is NOT recommended if abuse is one-sided).
There is more information on this in basics about violence and in Differentiating between abuse and violence.
The Facilitator
This is a facilitated model. Someone may take on the role of facilitator to guide the group through the process. You can have more than one facilitator, or share the role among your group. Facilitators may have special needs and concerns throughout the intervention, and there is a section to help. There is more information about the role of facilitators in Who can help.
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Anti-Violence Organisations
This toolkit has been written by people with long histories working in anti-violence. We encourage anti-violence organisations to consider offering community-based interventions as an option for people seeking help.
Other organisations, rōpū, businesses, iwi
This toolkit is also for people working in marae, rūnanga and iwi, social services, churches, community centres, political organisations, unions, sports teams, schools, child care centres, businesses or other groups where people live, play, work, worship, or do things together.
What is our vision?
This toolkit brings together vision and practice to respond to and end violence.
Our vision is based on the following assumptions:
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Help comes from those closest to you—friends, whānau, neighbours, co-workers and community members. This model does not rely on social services, agencies or the police, but it can be used alongside them if you want. With the help of this toolkit, you may be able to create a response which is quicker, safer and more effective than professional services or the police.
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People experiencing violence may need or want to stay in their relationships People often think that if there is abuse, the person who was harmed needs to end their relationship. If you want violence to stop but also need or want to stay in your relationship, it can be harder to find support. This toolkit has information and tools to help find support and help people support you.
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Community responses strengthen communities and people. This approach focuses on communities supporting each other to respond to and end violence. It does not rely on police, social services or state agencies.
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Preparing for action leads to safety, support and transformation This toolkit supports actions that move towards goals of safety, support and transformation from violence. Every action makes a difference. Taking more control over our lives and making healthy and positive decisions leads to more options for safety and transformation.
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Change takes time and support. Changing violence, repairing from violence, and creating new ways of being free from violence takes time. This toolkit can guide people through the difficult process of repair and change.
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For the person harmed, the tools aim to help with responding to, stopping and preventing violence, without blaming you for your choices, and supporting your own needs and wants.
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For the person doing harm, the tools aim to help you to recognise, end and be responsible for your violence (what we also call accountability), without giving you excuses, and without denying your humanity (without demonising).
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For people who want to help, the tools aim to help you with understanding, responding to, stopping and preventing violence. It may include supporting the person harmed in the way that they want, and supporting the person causing harm to stop and take accountability for their violence.
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Stronger communities are self-determining, healthy and sustainable. This toolkit supports practical responses to individual situations of violence. Its larger vision is growing self-determined, healthy and sustainable communities. When the people most affected by violence can choose who is best to help them and how to respond to and end violence, our communities and community leadership may change. As these approaches, skills and attitudes become part of everyday community responses to violence, our communities will resist the devastation of interpersonal violence, and move towards greater self-determination and well-being for all.
Contact Us
If you have feedback on this website or you want to share your story, write to us at mataora@twor-otaki.ac.nz