Start Intervention > People who have been harmed
 

Are you being hurt or have you been hurt by physical, emotional, verbal, sexual, financial abuse or other harmful behaviour?

The person hurting you could be a partner, parent or other family member, they might be a flatmate, friend, neighbour or co-worker, or someone else.

If you have 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 for you (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.


Online safety

Is it safe to read this website where you are? If you need to quickly hide that you are looking at this site, the quick exit button will close this page and take you to Stuff, a news website.

Your computer will normally keep a history of pages you have looked at. Many browsers will delete that list with the shortcut ctrl+shift+del. There are detailed instructions for most browsers at Computer Hope.

If the person hurting you knows enough about computers, the safest place for you to read this may be at a library, at a friend or whanaunga's house or at work.


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.

The purpose of this site is to support you to work out what to do and how to do it.  If it isn’t working for you, or if it is making things worse, you can stop at any point—even if you have asked people to help you.  Once other people are involved, it can be harder for you to control what happens, so thinking about who can help is very important (see Who can help).

You may want to print out some sections or tools to read or fill out later—if so, think about a safe place to keep them.  You may want to find someone who will go through this with you.  The information and tools on this site may be upsetting—think about when a good time is to read it and how you can look after yourself afterwards if needed.

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.  You don’t need to read 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 to you. 

If you have a specific goal, like finding people who can help you or getting the person who hurt you to take responsibility for what they did, find the topic about that goal.  If you find there are gaps you need to fill in, like getting clear about what happened or what you want, you can go back to those sections 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.