A young woman says she is officially deleting her ex from all my socials, looking determinedly into her phone screen. She leans closer and whispers: I am moving on. The footage appears in a New Zealand government video that affirms the universal truth that breakups suck as part of an unusual new campaign to support young people through their experience of being dumped and suggest healthy ways to process their feelings.
The Love Better campaign is a community of the newly broken up, which is a community of the newly broken up, which is a lotta hurt from becoming a lotta hurt, according to the video s voiceover.
It uses real footage of young people talking about how they deal with break-ups rather than scripted enactments, and will include videos, articles, podcasts and other social media content, including on TikTok and Instagram.
Priyanca Radhakrishnan, associate minister for social development, said on Wednesday that this isn't an approach that has been trialled by any other government around the world. The power of this campaign is the way that we are doing this using some of those real, raw stories but also making sure we have platforms that reach young people. Nearly 80% of New Zealand's 16 to 24 year-olds have been in a relationship, and 87% of them have experienced harm beyond the normal hurt of breaking up, according to research done in 2022 by the government. The figures show that 55% of young people are not confident or even slightly confident that they could end a relationship without harm.
One in six young people had had physical arguments in their relationships, and most of the hurt was emotional.
The Labour-led government launched New Zealand's first strategy to combat domestic violence in 2021, an issue that has been confounded by successive governments and is difficult to quantify, cited as one of the country's worst social ills.
Radhakrishnan, who ran a refuge organisation before she entered parliament, said we have very high family and sexual violence in New Zealand. We need some innovative ways to be able to do that, because we have been working to turn that around. The campaign will cost NZ $6.4 m $4 m over three years, allocated through prior funding announcements, the government said.
It seems like your only option after a break up, other than necessarily hating the person or cutting off the person, is not feeling anything in response, said Jo Madsen, Youthline's clinical lead. It is really cool to show that you have all these feelings in response to a breakup and these are some ways to deal with them in a healthy way. She said that social media and the internet have introduced unique and complicated dynamics to break-ups.
Or as one young person filming themselves lying in bed during the campaign's first video and working up to blocking their ex on social media: This is getting ridiculous. This is getting so out of hand.