White Ribbon Ride to leave from Nelson

Nelson will launch this year’s White Ribbon Day Riders’ South Island Tour, an annual event to highlight issues around domestic violence.
The ride will set off from the Zumo Coffee House near Anzac Park on at 9.30am on November 17, led by led by Colin Agnew, local White Ribbon Day ambassador, national campaigner Vic Tamati, with city councillor Matt Lawrey as the MC for the launch. There will be free coffee from 8am for all those who come in and sign the White Ribbon pledge.

Agnew is the Vice President of the South Island Chapter of the Patriots’ Defence Force Motorcycle Club, and has been involved with the White Ribbon Ride since it first began in 2008. He says he is very pleased to become an ambassador. “I may look tough, but I have a soft heart,” he says. “The ride means a lot to me, and the stories I’ve heard have only increased my determination to keep coming back each year.”

Agnew recalls the 2011 ride when a woman in Gore recognised his motorbike and approached him with her three children. The woman had talked to him at a White Ribbon Ride a few years before, and told Agnew it gave her the confidence to pack up and leave her violent household. She said she was now living in Gore, safe and happy with her children. “It’s a sign to me that I need to keep doing this as long as it takes,” Agnew said.

Mike Henderson from Nelson’s Te Rito Family Violence Network says national campaigher Vic Tamati had "LOVE" tattooed on his right hand as teenager, but the fist was the only love he knew.
“Tamati's parents were staunch Samoan churchgoers in Auckland, but were violent at home - when Tamati married and had his own family, he admits he was the same,” he says. “Tamati's tattoo is faded now, though the word LOVE is still visible. But the 59-year-old father of six, including rapper Ladi 6, no longer uses his fists to cause pain.”
Tamati's speaking circuit for the "It's Not OK" campaign takes him across the country with the simple message that without perpetrators, there are no victims. Before Tamati started the speaking circuit, he asked for his children's permission to share his - and their – story.

Henderson says the White Ribbon message is ‘Respectful relationships: “That’s a simple description of the positive behavior we want to be normal for everyone, instead of men’s violence against women being too often an everyday occurrence."

The White Ribbon ride will also promote consent as significant aspect of respectful relationships, targeting sexual violence. The campaign will continue to use its key strategy of men role-modelling good behavior and challenging other men who use violence. Hurst says the campaign will also include a theme of promoting flexible behavior.

"A man holding rigid views on what it means to be a man, or how a woman should behave, is at risk of being violent toward women, especially if he feels his views are threatened. Encouraging men to behave more flexibly, and not limiting them to only doing 'manly' things, will help prevent violence,” Henderson said.

The White Ribbon ride will launch in Nelson on 17 November, 8-9.30am Zumo Coffee House, 42 Rutherford Street Nelson.

ENDS

© Scoop Media