Here's the tension at the heart of New Zealand's family violence response: courts referred 3,800 people to adult safety programmes in 2024/2025 — a record high that suggests the justice system is taking domestic violence seriously and intervening early.

But scroll down that same dataset and you'll find the number that undermines everything: fewer than 3,000 people actually completed those programmes. (Source: Ministry of Justice, family-violence — 2.Adult safety programmes)

We're referring people to programmes faster than the programmes can see them through. That's not a success story. That's a queue.

These aren't voluntary attendees. Court-ordered referrals mean a judge looked at someone's behaviour and said: you need intervention. That intervention is supposed to break the cycle — teach impulse control, accountability, how to recognise the warning signs before violence happens.

But if nearly half don't finish, what are we actually achieving? We're creating a paper trail that says we did something, while the behaviour that got them referred in the first place goes unchanged.

The gap between referrals and completions isn't new, but it's widening. More referrals sounds like progress until you realise the system can't absorb them. Programmes have waitlists. Offenders move regions. Some are sentenced to prison before they finish. Others just stop showing up, and there's limited capacity to follow up.

And here's what makes this particularly grim: for the people living with these offenders — partners, children, extended whānau — a court referral often feels like the moment safety is finally within reach. Someone in authority has acknowledged the danger. Help is coming.

Except help only works if people complete it. An unfinished programme is a promise broken, and the people left behind are the ones who pay the price.

The 3,800 referrals tell you how many times the justice system tried to intervene this year. The completion number tells you how many times it actually worked. That's the number that matters — and it's the one we're not hitting.

If we're serious about reducing family violence, the question isn't how many people we can refer. It's how many we can get through the door, keep engaged, and see all the way to the end. Right now, we're failing at that by the hundreds.