Awareness on Family Harm during White Ribbon Week

4 A Better City

Respectful relationships and healthy masculinity celebrated @WhiteRibbonEvent Saturday 21st November 11.30am – All Welcome.

Every year around this time organisations who care about the wellbeing of people and our city in the area of family harm come together to celebrate a day encouraging awareness and education.

Next week is White Ribbon week. It is a week when we have the opportunity as a country to think about ways we can support, learn, and acknowledge those who experience family harm.

Greg Finnigan the Service Manager at Man Kind, a house for men in Lower Hutt says “What men internalise about power and gender is often not good for them at all. The way men try to hold onto the power and control can be destructive for the whole family. It can destroy all the opportunities to show the love they feel and want to bring to the home. Society has changed, families have changed, men need to be curious how they might change.”

This year the White Ribbon campaign continues to focus on Respectful Relationships, relationships that are built on equality and fairness between women, men, and children. Our seeing and acknowledging these outdated beliefs of the past is a particular focus for us in 2020. Respectful relationships aren’t about manipulation and mind games - they require us to treat our partners as our equals by listening to each other and making decisions together.

The Whakatauki for us this year is - Ruia te taitea, ka tu taikaka anake / Shake off the old, to reveal the new. If we think of the #outdated ideas as something that needs to be removed, in the natural world that removal often allows new growth to occur. In other words, if we remove that which is holding us back, we can grow as human beings and develop what we call healthy masculinity. #Outdated messages like “Show them who’s boss” this will be overwritten with SHOW THEM YOU LOVE THEM and “Kids should keep quiet” – KIDS SHOULD BE HEARD (When a child asks a question, they are reaching out to us to learn something), or “Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen?” - TREAT ‘EM EQUAL.

As part of the whanau event there will be local stories shared, kapa haka celebrated and heaps of family entertainment will be enjoyed along with a free sausage sizzle. We hope you and your family will make it along. It is worth celebrating respectful relationships, non-coercive, caring ways of relating in our community.

The convoy gets underway at 11.00am on Saturday 21st November starting from St Patrick’s Silverstream, with a whanau event beginning at 11.30-1.30pm at UH Primary school.

If you need further information please contact Sallie Calvert on 027 599 7000. Find out more