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Economic Cost of Family Violence

In December 1994, Coopers and Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouse Coopers) released an excellent report by Suzanne Snively, The New Zealand Economic Cost of Family Violence. It built upon a similar study done in New South Wales in June 1991, The Costs of Domestic Violence. Here, we merely outline the conclusions and present some of the figures arrived at, plus note a few points relevant to the cost of crime in New Zealand generally.

We wish to acknowledge and thank Suzanne Snively for kindly providing a copy of this report to us free of charge. We would have been happy to pay for it as it is an excellent and extremely thorough analysis, running to some 70 pages.

The economic cost of family violence is at least $1,186,855,000, assuming a prevalence rate of one in ten families. This is a conservative estimate. Other estimates have been for a rate of family violence of one in seven or even as high as one in four families. This does not take into account income foregone by the victims. These costs are broken down for the one in seven prevalence rate in the table below. For the other prevalence ratios, the only cost that will change very significantly is the total of individual costs. The direct costs of police callouts, welfare involvement etc remain the same regardless of actual prevalence ratio.

Taking the total costs to the individual, and dividing this by the number of victims from 1994, 37,144, the average total cost per individual is $10,730. Dividing the estimated costs to the government by the same number gives a cost per victim of $22,510. Therefore the total economic cost per person is $33,241.

Now if we are to use this cost in order to compare it with the cost of imprisonment, we will need to remove the Law Enforcement component, giving a total of $1,146,999,000. Divide that by the number of victims gives a cost to the government per victim of $20,149, and a total cost of $30,879 per person.

This does not fully account for the horrendous emotional and social costs for victims and their families, particularly in more serious cases. The cost to us all of such horrors as the Lillybing case is immense, with such huge amounts of human potential being wasted, the economic cost being the least traumatic...