Preventing Violence in the Home is a national organisation, offering training and consultancy throughout New Zealand and is now the largest single family violence prevention service in New Zealand.
The agency helps people to be safe from family violence through 24-hour crisis intervention, education, advocacy, liaison and interagency networking. It services include a telephone crisis line, face to face counselling, callout advocacy service, child crisis team and education programmes including a corporate workplace programme and Men’s Stopping Violence Programme. Dame Silvia Cartwright, the Governor General of NZ is the patron.
It employs 22 paid staff, over 60 volunteers and 20 contractors, in addition to having 55 society members. Preventing Violence provides an extensive range of services, including a national 0508 Family Violence Helpline; 24 hour crisis and advocacy for adult and child victims of family violence; a stopping violence programme for abusive people; a Child Crisis Team intervention service for children who have witnessed family violence; coordination of SAFTINET, an interagency network; and also many different training programmes. All of the agency’s services set a high standard for quality and effectiveness and many are not available elsewhere in the country, or even in many other parts of the world.
The agency works in local community offices so that people needing help can access them easily. A major goal is to assist families to safely remain in their own homes, without the disruption of having to leave friends, neighbourhoods, schools and employment to relocate.
In the development of their services, Preventing Violence gave careful consideration to making them as accessible as possible by facilitating gateways to assistance. For this reason, training programmes have been developed which are appropriate for the needs of community groups, work sites and for professionals working in the welfare, justice and health sectors to ensure they know how to assist victims of violence to become safe.
Preventing Violence in the Home is an incorporated society with charitable status and was formed in 1990. For two thirds of its history, the agency’s primary function was to run a crisis telephone service for the Auckland region. However, over the last five years the agency has undergone rapid growth in response to a much more expansive vision of what could be possible and an optimistic approach to making this vision reality.
