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Increasing Murders of Women - Action Needed

In the last two months women have been murdered by male partners at the rate of one a fortnight.

“Despite a great deal of public money and new initiatives, indications are that more women than ever before are being murdered by their partners or ex partners”, says Roundtable on Violence Against Women spokeswoman Ruth Herbert.

“In the five years between 2000 and 2004, 45 women were murdered by their male partner or ex-partner and 3 men were murdered by their female partner or ex-partner. This equates to one woman murdered every five weeks. In recent months it has been one woman murdered every two weeks.

"We have all been assuming that increased reporting to Police is a good thing, showing our communities are standing up to domestic violence. But more women dead at the hands of their partners, suggests that levels of violence against women are actually on the increase.

“It’s very hard to even monitor the problem, because the Police haven’t released any statistics on the gender of domestic violence murder victims since 2004 so community agencies such as ours have to scan the media and compile our own unofficial statistics.

“New Zealand has ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). In 2007 the CEDAW Committee told us off for not paying attention to gender in our crime statistics. Their recommendation was that NZ began collecting data on all forms of violence against women.

“In July 2008 the Police started recording the gender of the victim for all domestic violence cases, which is great news and well overdue. But the Police say the gender data will not be analysed for another two years because it ‘isn’t seen as a priority’. This is just not good enough.

“We need to know. If more women are being killed, despite the current efforts, we need all the experts around the table now to work out what is going wrong.”

ENDS

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