Refuge coping with pressure

An increasingly diverse community, the flow-on effects of the recession and a challengingly large rural location are putting more pressure on Marlborough's Women's Refuge, but its national leader is happy with its performance.

Heather Henare, chief executive officer for the National Collective of Independent Women's Refuges, is in Blenheim until Friday as part of the Marlborough Violence Intervention conference.

The Marlborough branch was doing a "fantastic job", she said.

Over 500 women and children used Marlborough Women's Refuge services between July 2008 and June 2009, 100 more than last year.

Ms Henare said the arrival of foreign workers in recent years had raised new challenges for the refuge, including language barriers and cultural differences. She said some of those workers discovered they had easier access to drugs and alcohol which had been "problematic" in some instances.

"But with or without the seasonal workers, family violence is still a problem in Blenheim like every other community in this country."

Ms Henare said nationally, pressures of the recession had seen an increasing number of white, middle-class women contacting the centres for help. Many women had been able to get themselves out of ugly situations by going to holiday homes or overseas, but less money meant these options were no longer there.

Referring to high-profile case of Whakatane policeman Adrian Hilterman, who was convicted on two charges of assaulting his doctor wife, Ms Henare said cases such as these had always existed in middle-class society.

She also listed television presenter Tony Veitch, who pleaded guilty to injuring partner Kirsten Dunne-Powell with reckless disregard in April, and Clayton Weatherston who stabbed his 22-year-old girlfriend Sophie Elliott 216 times.

People often associated domestic violence with cases such as the death of the Kahui twins, Ms Henare said.

"But when you start looking at violence in areas where people are like `well, he's a policeman and she's a GP', we didn't think that would be happening there ... well, it's been happening there for a long time."

* Women's Refuge Crisis line (operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week) is 035209999.

- The Marlborough Express