Start Intervention > Community Allies
 

Is someone you know being hurt by physical, emotional, verbal, sexual or financial abuse or other harmful behaviour?  Is someone you know hurting someone else?  Do you want to support them to end their violence?  Has someone asked you for support?

This toolkit has resources to help you support the people affected by violence, to end the violence or to deal with violence that happened in the past.

If you found this website by yourself, and you are working out what to do without support, there are tools here that can help work out what is most urgent in your situation, where to start and how to bring in other people to help (see the topics below).

If you already have lots of support, for example if you’re part of a community or whānau that wants to do something about the violence, this website can help you work out a plan for your situation.

Either way, a good place to start is reading the Basics about violence section to help you understand what is going on.  The Basics about violence intervention section shares lessons Creative Interventions have learned from responding to violence.  Interpersonal violence is complicated.  It takes time to understand it and work out what to do.

 

Introducing the model

Every response to violence is different, this isn’t a step-by-step model to follow.  Your intervention (what you do to respond to violence) might be simple and short term, or longer and more involved.  You might only need one or two tools to work out what you are going to do, or you might work through all of the topics and tools. 

You don’t need to read everything.  Find the tools or information that help you.

We’ve noticed that responses to violence have four main phases, with a slightly different focus at each phase.  We’ve arranged the questions that people want help with into 8 topics.  

 

Phases of an intervention

Topics to help

There are 8 topics with information and tools.  Your intervention doesn’t need to include all these topics, and you don’t need to be involved in everything that happens.  This website contains a lot of information and resources—don’t be overwhelmed.  Focus on what is most urgent and useful. 

If you have a specific goal, like getting someone who is hurting people to stop, or helping someone who has been hurt to work out what they want, find the topic about that goal.  If you find there are gaps you need to fill in, like getting clear about what happened or finding others to help, you can go back to those topics as you need.

This list gives you an idea of where to find the information and tools you want on this website.

Values

If you want to do something about a situation of violence (past, present or future), the FAQs and Basics  sections explain how violence works and how this approach stops violence, and the Real stories section has examples of people using this model.  Start by reading those sections if you have time (the About section has more background to the model and organisations involved).

If you want to quickly check if this model might work for you without reading those sections, the following tools may help.