Punanga Tauturu to visit Atiu

Punanga Tauturu (Cook Islands Womens Counselling Centre) will be visiting Atiu from the 12th to 18th May as part of its Outer Islands visit programme. Director Kairangi Samuela told the Herald on Tuesday the objectives of the visit are two –fold. Firstly, to carry out awareness on family violence and secondly, to document stories which identify how women contribute to their island economies. Samuela will be accompanied on the trip by Shona Pitt who will record events on camera.
The focus of aware raising will be in school with year 10 and 11 students and identifying coping mechanisms in relation to violence within their communities. This is an especially important issue as we have found on many of the islands young people are aware of the violence that goes on within their own families but their way of coping is to either view it as “normal” or to ignore what is happening. One of the concerns is that young people don’t feel that they have any older people within their communities that they can trust to tell their problems so hopefully by working in the schools we can work with the students to identify how they can talk about these issues with their teachers without fear of being put down or told to just “bear with it” – that’s the way life is.
PTI has also produced domestic violence ads for television with local production company Vivofx and we will be asking the students of Atiu School to evaluate and review the message of the ads and to also generate their own ideas for Television and Radio ads.
–Punanga Tauturu media release

Herald Issue 554 09 March
- Norm exposes Trio of Doom
- Briefs from PM’s media conference Tuesday
- Tourism Industry ponders $5 million draft strategy
- Norman George resigns from Cook Islands Party
- Letter of Resignation from CIP
- Norman selfish says Prime Minister