Push Over – a short story

This is a story about Revenge. First a note from me:

New Zealand has one of the highest rates of violence and sexual assault against women and children in the OECD. After I returned home to New Zealand in 1994, I was astounded at the level of violence within families and have grown more alarmed over the years as the statistics have grown.

Various new laws and government interventions are active. But one of the overriding issues I have come to understand is that there is something amiss in our Kiwi culture. In discussions over the years, it is apparent that an insidious misunderstanding about what is acceptable and what is not remains in our culture. Like many, you may be thinking, this is never acceptable. I would agree, but if you listen to others carefully, you hear the language of misunderstanding around violence.

I wrote this story to show how easily sexual assault happens in ordinary lives, in our homes where women and children should feel safe, free from aggression.

Push Over is a fictionalised narrative based on an amalgamation of other people’s true-life stories told to me over many years. Some people are unable to comprehend the victim’s response and believe situations, as described in Push Over, is  not assault or violence because the victim seems to have “co-operated.” I write this story to clearly express the domestic situations that arise and help explain how this occurs right under our noses. It also goes some way to articulating why women, who feel responsible and angry with themselves for letting this happen, take many years to speak up and more years to recover and gain a perspective about who is the victim and why it’s not them.

Of course, this is a contemporary fiction story and has the elements of intrigue and revenge against the perpetrator, so the narrative reaches a satisfying conclusion – I hope. Sadly, for many victims of violence, this doesn’t happen.

This 15 page, eBook can be purchased for $1.15 on https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Nicky+Webber+books&i=stripbooks-intl-ship&ref=nb_sb_noss

Proceeds from this short story will go to Women’s Refuge in New Zealand.

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