Raising Awareness

Stories and videos

There are many good stories and videos about family violence with good messages and hope for change and healing.

• Ted Talk by Matt Brown ‘The Barber’ in Christchurch

• ‘A Call to Men’ Ted Talk by Tony Porter, in the USA

• Ministry of Justice ‘Talking about Family Violence’ series

Sharing stories of your own people

It can be very powerful to share stories from your own employees if there are people willing to share their own story to help raise awareness and understanding. However, there are important privacy and safety issues to consider.

• Ask if their story can be shared without using their name or identifying them in any way, and make sure they know there is no pressure on them to share their story and they can say no and no explanation is necessary

• Before asking them, you may want to consider having a policy or stance that your organization will only share stories about employee’s experience of domestic violence anonymously. If the employee wants to share their story using their name, it is important to consider whether this poses any risk to the employee’s safety, as it then is also a risk for your organization.  Shine’s policy is to share client stories anonymously unless the client wants to be named and we believe there is absolutely no risk to them, their children or anyone else of going public – e.g. their abuser is living overseas, is in prison or has passed away.

• If they say yes, change their name and enough detail in the story so that someone who knows them would not know it was about that person, e.g. their ethnicity, age, and/or ethnicity, ages, and genders of their children, etc. Let the employee read the edited version of the story and have control over how their details are changed and whether the changes are sufficient for anonymity.

A good example of this is in this opinion editorial written by Ali Mau that includes the story of a Stuff employee.

Finally, if the story you share describes physical violence or a traumatic event, it is always a good idea to include a ‘trigger warning’ at the beginning of the story that warns readers about the content. This is especially helpful for people recovering from their own experiences of trauma who want to avoid being triggered.