Statistics reveal that police callouts for domestic violence in NZ have doubled in the last 10 years.

The police are called out to a situation of family violence every 7 minutes…

Every 2.5 weeks a woman is killed by her partner…

50% of the homicides in New Zealand are family violence related…

Around 12 children are killed every year… by someone in their home.

I lived for about 10 years in a third world slum in the Philippines, it was 18 months before I began to have some inkling of how it must be for a woman to live in that place. I walked into a dark room, the home of another mother who's child was close to death from a preventable disease. My heart was raw with the grief of the baby I had recently lost. As I stared at this young woman, with a bundle of emaciated children, living trapped in an environment of poverty and disease, my heart broke for her.

Returning to New Zealand in 1994, and looking at this land of paradise with it’s 3 bedroom homes and grassy front yards it was hard to see that any woman in New Zealand lived in the kind of prison I had witnessed in that dark room in the slums of Manila. We have welfare, free education, health care, and even legal aid!

Then I came to work at Merivale (then Baptist Action, now IOSIS) safe house and programme for mothers and children in crisis. I sat in a room with New Zealand women who told their stories of rape and violence, neglect and chaos, and my heart broke again. I have seen there is no greater agony than knowing that every relationship you have is with someone who sees you only as someone to be used. Yours is the body for venting another person's anger at the world or for finding sexual satisfaction. Sure, we have the DPB and a protection order, but the relationship is where you find the only semblance of affection and companionship that you know, somehow a rape and a beating have become a price that must be paid.

In our work at IOSIS we strive to bring new UNDERSTANDING about how relationships must be...
We aim for new strategies for communication, new ways to see the people we live with, and safety for those in danger.

Ruby Duncan
Chief Executive Officer
IOSIS Family Solution