Witnessing violence in the home

Ethnic differences

There were significant differences between ethnic groups, after adjustment for age, sex and socio-economic status, in the proportions of students who reported witnessing an adult in their home hitting or hurting a child or another adult.

New Zealand European students were least likely to report witnessing this type of violence and Pacific and Māori students were most likely to report witnessing it.

Proportion (%) of secondary school students witnessing violence by an adult in the home in the last 12 months, by type of violence and ethnicity of student, 2001
  Type of adult violence witnessed
Hitting or hurting
a child
(%)
Hitting or hurting
another adult
(%)
Ethnic group (95% CI) (95% CI)
New Zealand European 12.5 2.7
(11.6, 13.5) (2.3, 3.2)
Māori 21.3 10.0
(19.4, 23.3) (8.4, 11.6)
Pacific peoples 28.1 11.1
(24.8, 31.5) (8.4, 13.8)
Asian 13.4 6.6
(10.8, 15.9) (5.0, 8.3)
Other 14.1 5.9
(9.1, 19.1) (3.4, 8.4)

Source: Youth2000 Survey.
Note: “95%CI” (95 percent confidence interval) signifies that there is a 95 percent chance that the true value falls within this range.  If the respective confidence intervals (in brackets) do not overlap, the difference between rates is likely to be statistically significant
.

Note

We encourage you to be cautious about drawing conclusions from comparisons between ethnic groups.  Apparent differences (in unadjusted data) between ethnic groups can often be explained by factors other than ethnicity per se, such as the different age, sex, geographical and socioeconomic distributions of different ethnic populations.  In addition, datasets vary in the way that they collect and record ethnicity data.