White Ribbon Day

November 25^th was White Ribbon Day. Not a day to raise awareness for traditional cancers but certainly still a day to raise awareness of a cancer of sorts, one that dogs New Zealand and reaches far and wide across socioeconomic boundaries. Much like cancer, it often goes undetected, unseen and untreated. Unlike tumours though, there’s no chance of it being benign, it’s always malignant.

I’ve followed numerous articles over the last few years of cases that have poor outcomes from a system that is either too rigid, too easily manipulated by the one with the better lawyer, or just not equipped with sufficient empathy to deliver the right outcomes. A shakeup is long overdue. Some immediate changes would make a world of difference to those already in the system. One example would be to cap legal fees so that both sides would be able to afford a decent lawyer. Another example would be to provide financial aid in civil matters.

Whilst it’s great that the Government ‘may’ review the system and there ‘may’ be an overhaul, this is still playing with the tail of the snake. The problem with focusing at this end of the beast is that the damage is already done. Someone has already suffered. Someone has already been abused, be it financially, physically, emotionally, mentally, sexually, or a combination of any or all. Sometimes someone has died.

It’s sad that it has to get to this point for anyone to notice or for anyone to report on it. It’s like when someone commits suicide and everyone gathers, everyone mourns and everyone says, ‘Isn’t it just so sad, if only we’d seen the signs.’ Where were all these people when the person was going through their mental illness or during the events leading up to their decision to take their life? Where was the upfront support? Where was the fence at the top of the cliff?

The government have their ‘It’s Not OK’ site but it’s not advertising to the right audience to drive prevention, it’s being offered as a cure. The government are too busy trying to solve what they perceive to be ‘bigger problems’. A few years ago the government released an advert encouraging mates to tell their mates, ‘It’s not OK’. I’ve no idea how they thought they’d measure the success of this advert other than through the sad metric of whether there is a drop in ‘reported’ domestic abuse cases. Bearing in mind that the majority of domestic abuse incidents go unreported, they’re not measuring anything.

Their campaign relied heavily on people realising the signs or noticing what’s going on. People increasingly travel through life with a lack of peripheral vision and insight. People not exposed to others’ experiences of abuse may never see the signs. Even those knowing something is wrong themselves may rely on others to point out what may be happening as they can’t quite pinpoint the type of abuse they’re a victim of.

Government adverts are cobbled together by experts and ad agencies. I wonder what makes them experts? I’ve spoken to an expert, a true expert. It wasn’t until I was 47 and, for me, that was 29 years too late.

Last year I befriended someone who is a victim of domestic abuse. This still continues with the other party being financially entwined in the home she takes so much pride in with her children. Over the years I’ve sought out information about abuse, I’ve talked to people, I’ve been to workgroups with other blokes but, until I knew this person and sat and listened, I never really understood. I never appreciated the damage we are truly capable of without ever lifting a hand. The psychological and emotional abuse we consciously and unconsciously wreak. The lasting, and sometimes irreversible, damage we do.

It took a true expert, a true knowledge holder, to give me my paradigm shift. These are the people who need a greater voice. They need a greater voice in our courts, they need a greater voice in the policymaking, they need a greater voice in the community, they need a greater place in our schools.

Family is the heart of it all. Family is the foundation of society, the cornerstone. In my mind, there can be no greater problem and no greater reward for us all if it is solved. People with no experience of the feelings and emotions associated with the abuse aren’t going to solve this. Brave and strong women who’ve been victims of this need to come out from the shadows and from behind the blogs to educate people from the victim’s viewpoint. Yes, I said women.

Someone somewhere says ‘Men are victims too’. Yes, they are but again we’re playing with the tail of the snake. Women are 99% of victims here. If you want to kill a snake cut its head off, don’t form a committee to discuss different ways to kill it.

So many things in life are considered ‘life lessons’. What if we could learn these lessons earlier in life? We all have those handfuls of things we’d love to go back and tell ourselves if we could, don’t we? No one else cares as much about your dreams as you do. Be kinder. Tell people you love them more often. It’s OK to not be OK. It doesn’t always work out. Those sorts of things.

Who had their first break-up and when someone said ‘It’ll be OK’ you hysterically replied, “But you don’t understand”, thinking you’re the first person this has ever happened to? What if we could add resilience and understanding at this point in someone’s life? What if we could better equip our young for this emotional rollercoaster of life rather than letting them learn the hard way and then be ill-prepared and lash out or react in more harmful ways? Why are these ‘Teach Your Kids Resilience’ courses a paid-for online course and not part of our regular curriculum?

Girls are more emotionally equipped for life than boys. That’s a fact. The first time in my life I attended a resilience course it was at the age of 44. The company I was working for said that, as part of their health and safety programme, they were sending us all on a course to help us deal with stress and change. Two weeks after the course they announced the restructure and redundancies. This is how we tend to see resilience course application.

What if we taught resilience in schools around relationships and emotional change. What if we taught boys to be better at an early age and helped them understand that life doesn’t always work out but gave them a toolkit to deal with this in non-destructive and non-abusive ways at the same time? What if we taught girls about the different kinds of abuse and how to identify toxic relationships to help them avoid these types of men in the first place? Some of the abuse can go on for years without the victim being able to pinpoint exactly what is happening, as is often the case of narcissistic abuse where gaslighting is rife.

Schools teach us maths, English, science, languages and the like. They have a brief helicopter view of sex education. They don’t teach us life skills. Rather than ‘We learn from our mistakes’ how about ‘We learn from our experiences but it’s OK to learn from other people’s experiences also’.

For me, empathy has been a learned skill, it never came naturally. I have a solutions-based mind. A partner would come to me upset and say, “This is broken”, and I’d hand it back and say, “There you go, all fixed”. It took me time to understand that wasn’t what they needed. Like all emotions, they are developed over time. If only I knew these things earlier in life and had a head start on the process. It would have served me far greater in life than knowing Napoleon lived out his final days on Saint Helena.

Schools need to better equip us at a younger age to deal with some of life’s experiences, particularly those that rely heavily on emotional response. You can ask a child if they’re happy and they say yes or no but do they understand happiness or are they confusing their current emotion with the joy of the moment? The home and family plays a part but sometimes that is fractured, sometimes it’s not a safe place.

Sometimes all the things we need to learn that aren’t right are in the family home, sometimes the ‘teachers’ in the home don’t have the knowledge or emotional capacity and understanding themselves to know how to hand it down. We often leave school lacking emotional resilience, empathy, compassion and understanding. We’re full of knowledge but lacking in learning. How do we teach a child the meaning of emotional hygiene?

Building any kind of framework or structure requires a sound foundation, a cornerstone. Upon this all other weight bears down. If the foundation is strong then the rest of the structure will have good footing. I believe, that for the most part, men who carry abuse into relationships, have had the traits from an early age. That’s another reason the government advert mentioned above was targeting people late in their abusive life cycle. It’s aimed at blokes in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Do we really think these behaviours start to happen that late in life?

I see educating people at an age when they’re first entering relationships as invaluable. Both boys and girls. Boys more so on the long-lasting effects abusive patterns can have on their victims. Girls on different types of abuse, identifying it and ways of stopping it.

Having these brave women who’ve been victims of this abuse talk to boys and girls at this time in their life may in some way at least break the chain for some of those people at an early stage. That’s all we have to start doing, breaking a few of the chains. As we break a few, the others will get weaker. It will take time and some will fall through the cracks but every chain we break at the start will stop another person being a victim. Every court procedure we change will just treat a victim a little bit better but there will still be a victim with this approach.

Talking to my friend I learned that it’s not about the number of monsters or demons you slay, it’s about the number of people you save from the monsters and demons. That includes the monsters themselves. I don’t know how I can ever repay her for the insight and change she has given me to life other than to be a better person, a better man. I think that’s all women want us to be too. They don’t want the fancy gifts or the flashy gestures, they just want us to be better friends, better listeners, better partners, better husbands, better fathers. I think that’s the very least we can do.

Spend less time working on the car, less time polishing the motorbike, less time on the PlayStation and spend more time working on your relationships, more time having open conversations and more time listening. It all takes practice, just like everything we do. Don’t be afraid to open up. Know that you’re not the first person or couple having an issue when one arises. Be honest with each other. Know that there is a lot of help and support out there for us all, we just have to ask. What’s 5-minutes of embarrassment compared to a lifetime of regret?

New Zealand has one of the highest rates of sexual and domestic violence in the developed world. Police respond to a family violence incident every four minutes. Keep in mind that this is reported abuse. Is this something you are proud of Kiwi men?

Men of New Zealand, I challenge you to be better.