One of the men behind a programme working to turn around violent men says his rock bottom was “bashing up” his eight-year daughter with the heel of a platform shoe.
In a confronting interview on Breakfast, Vic Tamati from Safe Men Safe Family said he was like many other violent men, having grown up with violence, and without love or forgiveness.
“The turning point was having bashed up everybody and sundry, thinking that’s normal,” he said.
“I ended up bashing up my eight-year-old daughter, just because she was having an argument about turning a light off, bashed her with a platform shoe.
“Then when she stood up to me, I turned the shoe around and bashed her with the heel of the shoe, when that happened I knew there was something seriously wrong with me, who was doing that to men in the community but then also doing it to my eight-year-old baby.”
Tamati tried to commit suicide following the assault.
“When I was growing up I got a hiding with the sapelu, the machete, I was thinking at the time, you’re useless, blah blah blah, so I had to kill myself," he said.
Terry Taniwha said the Safe Men Safe Family tried to talk to men’s hearts, not their ears.
“That’s when the epiphany starts, instead of talking to the ears, we try to talk to the heart.”
The biggest obstacle for men to turn away from a life of violence was themselves and the smallest things like touch could be huge for many, Tamati said.
“It’s him [that’s the biggest obstacle] because he’s locked in to so many different things, usually it’s not the big one, the violence, the physical, it’s usually like the smallest things, like we actually have a secret handshake and the last bit of it is a hug. If you don’t have a hug from your dad, which was me, then you come to the realisation that you never had a hug from your mum,” Tamati said.
“For me personally, no one taught me what that [forgiveness] looked like, no one showed me, so it’s a life journey of forgiving myself, all of those things.
“Not an easy thing knowing for the last 40-odd years you’ve just been a full-blown perpetrator, cause why didn’t I know anything else? Why couldn’t I stop doing what I did? How could I when I didn’t know?”
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