Kerrianne | Papatoetoe
“Because I’m quite a sensitive person, and as a job I work with women at the Women’s Refuge, for myself I think I would like to stop being more critical of myself in terms of caring about what other people think about myself. So that’s probably what I want to do, because then I think, if I’m like that then I’ll be better at my job and just better as a human being as well.
I grew up in Ōtara, actually lived in Ōtara and then me and my family, me and my mum and my siblings, we went into Women’s refuge for a little while, and then we shifted back to Ōtāhuhu, been in South Auckland my whole life. I always say that the reason that I do this work is because I want to show people that they can come out of those situations that they’re in. Whether it be domestic violence or traumatic events, because I think in South Auckland, especially, we get into the mentality, like we can’t better ourselves. Whereas, I think we can, and I think that was why I wanted to do this job and I’m in it.
I think I’d like to be a bolder person, because I can be quite timid. I’m quite open to people that I know, but I get quite shy when it’s people that I don’t. At work I can kind of switch into that role where I’m okay with talking with other people, but in my home life where I’m comfortable, I’ll only talk to the person that I know. So I’d like to be bolder.
I guess my message I preach every day when I go to work is that it’s okay to ask for help, but it’s also good to speak up. A lot of the families that I deal with a lot of the time they’re stuck in the violence because they think it’s okay, to be in the situations that they are because they don’t know that there’s a life outside of it. But, I think having conversations about what’s going on is healthy, and I think we need to kind of break that mentality of keeping quiet and sweeping it under the carpet, because it doesn’t work. It’s continued from generation to generation, and if we start having conversations in these environments that are safe, I think it can only help with violence decreasing as a result of that.
Like I mentioned earlier, I went into a refuge as a kid, because I had DV [domesic violence] growing up with my parents, and I experienced it firsthand. I was quite young, so I’m glad that I didn’t see most of the violence, but I want to show people that there’s life outside of that. They don’t have to be stuck in that cycle, because a lot of it is normalised, the behaviour, because that’s all people know. Whereas, I think when you get into places where you can talk about the issues, the hard issues of life, and be okay, and then.
When I grew up as a kid, when you’re in DV [domestic violence] you don’t think there’s life outside of it. You just, you’re just in it. You’re immersed in it. When we came out of it, at the end of the day, life got so much better for us, and I think people don’t know that life can exist beyond it. So I think coming from that dark place to where I am now, I want to show others that it’s possible in the type of work that I do. Seeing stories like my own, you can come outside of violence.”
