•
•
•
Securing sector leadership. Strong
leadership is required from government
and violence/disability/justice sector
organisations to ensure a shared
understanding of, and commitment to,
ongoing change and development.
Resourcing of these processes. Specific
resources will be needed to promote
partnerships and develop relationships.172
Supporting a twin track approach to
prevention and response. A twin track
approach to prevention means eliminating
barriers - barriers to disabled people’s full
participation in society and barriers to the
full realisation of their rights, as well as the
implementation of specific strategies to
prevent violence. This twin track approach
means that government strategies to
prevent and respond to violence against
disabled people must focus both on
structural drivers of violence and abuse as
well as responses to individuals and whānau.
•
Adopting an ecological model understanding
of disability. Central to this is an analysis of
how systems of power put disabled people
at risk, as opposed to disabled people being
inherently damaged or at risk.
•
An ecological approach to prevention
describes four levels of response to the
barriers and gaps identified in the previous
section. The four levels are:
1. individual biological and personal factors
2. relationships – a person’s close peers,
family and partners
50
Human Rights Commission
3. community – the settings and social
environments in which people live, play
and work173
4. structural factors
which the Centre for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) say are:
…the broad societal factors that help create
a climate in which violence is encouraged or
inhibited. These factors include social and
cultural norms that support violence as an
acceptable way to resolve conflicts. Other
large societal factors include the health,
economic, educational, and social policies
that help to maintain economic or social
inequalities between groups in society.174
These principles underpin a constructive whole
of society response that incorporates the
knowledge, experience and expertise of tāngata
whaikaha Māori and disabled people at every
level; addressing structural barriers, making
mainstream services accessible, developing
the specialist services that will keep particular
groups of disabled people safe, and helping
tāngata whaikaha Māori and disabled people
recover from violence-related harm.
These principles guide the process for
implementing the recommendations that follow.
The recommendations are extensive which
reflects the extent of the work to be done.