Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Some people looked and smiled. Some people looked and then looked away again, quickly. Some people stood and stared.
My family has an informal policy for dealing with this sort of stuff, as my niece has Downs Syndrome. We figure it's part of people learning to accept difference around them, and just focus on her. At her age of 3, she doesn't notice that people are staring, and if she does, she just grins at them, and most people smile back.
Maybe it'll be different when she's older, but I figure at this stage if people can be left to watch and see a little of what we find so wonderful in her, than a little staring won't hurt.
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Back on (a) topic, now that it seems he threw her down some stairs, went down the bottom, kicked the hell out of her and then left her there for 6 hours unconscious I feel much better.
Assuming the Herald has got things correct there, that's an astounding story. That's not just violence, which is terrible. That's a complete failure of his humanity. Fucked up.
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And in Dunedin they have a mayor that can sing, and even that doesn’t get him into the magazines.
The other week he was on the front page of the ODT singing in a full wedding dress, with veil. I think that makes him about 5 times the mayor than John Banks. Nyer.
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But even if the interview style or subject tunes me out for a bit, commercial advertising sends me but to the nation broadcaster every time.
Hear hear. My 10 year old doesn't like national radio (which is fair enough) so when we're travelling in the car we switch to Hauraki (Japanese import, radio doesn't get any useful FM stations). I get very annoyed with their '40 minute no ad' whatevers, which are filled with adverts about their 40 minute no ad period. And then the 15 minutes between the 40 minutes and the news is stacked full of adverts to make the money for the whole hour.
I can't say I hate Noelle at all, but she drives my mother and husband batty. I'm not sure why...
She has a lovely accent. She could read out the phone book over the airwaves and it would take me a while to lose interest.
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I don't think Veitch has been in any programme yet, just private counselling.
Yeah, for some reason for me that's an important question - was this the sort of proper programme that a court would have put him into to specifically deal with violence? Or was it something else like a counsellor where the focus might have been more general?
The last thing you'd want is for this to be repeated with another incident of violence because he hasn't learnt to control himself and deal with the problem.
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I do rather wonder why some of these guys who 'lose control' on their partners have the ability to *not* 'lose control' at certain other times. Like, say, when they're surrounded by big brick-shithouse dudes in public somewhere.
I did some work for the police in the mid-90s as a summer job, writing a report on violence in the Wellington region. Inevitably it included a large look at domestic violence.
The most interesting thing I found was the completely different understandings of violence between the police and womens refuge.
For the police violence was inside people, and allowed to be released, normally through consumption of alcohol. Alcohol removed the normal inhibitions that kept people acting reasonably. The police were pushing for me to find data which they could use to argue against the extension of alcohol licensing, longer opening hours, etc. They weren't attacking violence, they were attacking the things that they thought brought it to the surface.
The Womens Refuge coordinators that I spoke to during my research were very cynical of the police's understanding of domestic violence. They were much more interested in why, if you put two people in the same situation (drunk, in a stressful argument with a partner), why one would use violence, and the other wouldn't. They were attempting to answer deeper, more difficult questions about violence. What is it about a person that makes them violent?
It was a classic contrast of the two approaches - Police dealing with the symptoms and trying to stop them occurring, Womens Refuge dealing with causes, and arguing that the problem underneath should be dealt with.
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Some things have absolute thresholds even if they otherwise include degrees, in this case of violence. That's the basis of saying "it's not ok" rather than "it's relatively not ok".
I fully agree with you here Sacha. For me the question is then 'now what'?
My understanding of the changes that were put through in policy in the early 90s around domestic violence is that the drive to get offenders in front of a judge was not primarily about punishing, or making offenders accountable for their actions. The primary reason was about pushing offenders into various programmes - Men Without Violence I think most of them were called - offered by various groups - and having that involvement responsible back to the courts, so if they didn't complete the course, the big stick could be brought out.
Without knowing what programme Veitch went through, I wonder what they'd think of his statement and actions since he was in their programme.
If we ask a philosophical question "is it OK for two individuals to deal with this privately, if it leads to _most_ of what a court would do - enrolment in an appropriate programme, payment for medical costs, loss of income".
When we consider that he probably missed out on either some jail time, preventative detention, or community service, if that matters to 'us', then that's a failure. I'm not sure personally how I feel about saying that _all_ serious crimes should lead to jail time, but I'd say that ones involving violence generally should.
For me personally his public statement was another failure - he was almost taking responsibility, but then excuses came out. I wonder what the people who ran his programme would think about his ownership of what he did.
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um, Kyle, I hope your Dad wasn't there. Heh
OK, now you're really weirding me out.
But probably not, he always worked in Auckland Central district when he was a 'real cop'.
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A press conference, presuming you have the status to pull one, is the best medium for getting your explanation out there exactly how you want it. Veitch has years of media experience and access to the best legal and public relations advice money can buy. If his side of the story was that different, we'd know it by now.
Well maybe. I just get the feeling that everyone is viewing people in celebrity-land as making perfect decisions when under pressure. Clearly Veitch doesn't always do that.
If I was a PR consultant, god forbid, I suspect I would have been concerned about the world having TV footage of him saying "I only hit her once" or "after I hit her she fell and the bones in her back broke" or whatever. If he was a politician you'd get through the media conference by not giving out any TV quotes, and then get the sob story out there through a sympathetic media outlet, Oprah or whatever, that would allow you to phrase it in the 'best possible' way.
If I was his lawyer then I absolutely would have stopped him saying those things any more than "some of the things said in the media are untrue". By clarifying the position further he's making the admission of assault that the police would need to convict him.
It's all really quite sad. I did some research on domestic violence in the mid-90s, and in many ways we haven't changed the world at all.
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He does not, at any stage refute these reports. He does not say " The reports are incorrect" . He does not say "The reports are somewhat mistaken", No, he says what he says.
He says that "some of what has been said by the media is untrue, but again, no excuses".
Personally I wonder how strong the argument is that "if the Dom Post wasn't correct, they would have been sued". A defamation hearing presumably would involve going over in great detail exactly what happened that night between the two of them. He might feel his strategy is better to just say "that's not entirely correct", and then tell it via the much more sympathetic outlet of Paul Holmes tomorrow. Legal threats might have been more effective before publication, but afterwards... running after the horse that has already bolted.