There is something disturbing in the language that appears so casually on Samoan social media.
Someone disagrees with a politician and the response is not simply that he is wrong, but that somebody should hit him. Someone becomes angry at another person and suddenly there is talk of sticks, beatings or killing. Sometimes it is written as a joke. Sometimes it is delivered with the confidence of someone defending family, village, church or political allegiance.
The alarming part is not merely that people become angry. Anger is human.
It is the speed with which violence becomes an imaginable response.
And in a country that has heard the Bible preached in its own language for generations, that is something we need to talk about.
Samoa does not simply describe itself culturally as Christian. Its Constitution states that Samoa is “a Christian nation founded on God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Christianity is embedded deeply in national life, village life, family life and public ceremony.
Yet beneath that religious identity sits a contradiction which Samoa’s own institutions have been warning about for years.
The National Public Inquiry into Family Violence, conducted by the Office of the Ombudsman after extensive consultations and a survey of 1,500 people, found extraordinary levels of violence and threats within Samoan families. Its findings included women reporting kicking, punching, slapping and being struck with hard objects, choking, threats of bodily harm and harsh verbal abuse. The Inquiry also heard repeatedly about violence being directed at children simply because an adult was frustrated.
The Inquiry made another observation that deserves much more attention than it has received.
Violence is cyclical.
It travels between relationships and between generations. It can begin inside a home and eventually spill into villages, schools, streets and the wider community. Samoa’s Ombudsman explicitly called for churches to take a proactive role, including preaching a theology of non-violence. The report argued that Fa’a Samoa, Christian faith and human rights should reinforce one another because all three contain ideas of dignity, respect, protection, love and peace.
That was Samoa talking to itself. It was not some foreign academic arriving to tell Samoans what their culture means.
And the newspaper archives make uncomfortable reading.
In 2017, a 15-year-old boy was killed after his drunken father struck him with a machete. The court heard that the father had previously been convicted of assaulting both his wife and the same son.
In another case, a man entered another man’s home carrying a machete after becoming angry over words allegedly spoken to his children. He struck the victim several times. In sentencing him, Justice Tafaoimalo Leilani Tuala-Warren spoke of the need to deter others from using machetes to attack people.
In 2021, Justice Vui Clarence Nelson while sentencing another man for a machete attack, he described alcohol abuse as an underlying factor in the majority of cases coming before the court and warned of the violence accompanying it.
The pattern has not disappeared.
In November 2025, police investigated a horrific case in which a woman was allegedly punched, kicked, stomped on, beaten with a stick and iron rod, had her hair cut and was tied to a pole. A video of the incident circulated on social media.
In March this year, four youths were charged after a schoolboy was attacked on the roadside in an incident captured on video and circulated online.
Earlier this month, police charged a 49-year-old man with threatening to kill Prime Minister La’aulialemalietoa Leuatea Polataivao Schmidt over a public Facebook post.
A newspaper archive is not a statistical study. Individual criminal cases should never be used to describe an entire people.
But neither should repeated violence be dismissed as a collection of unrelated incidents.
Samoa’s own Police Service lists assault and causing injury, sexual violence and domestic violence among crimes with significant community impact. A 2024 national government risk assessment went further, describing crimes against the person, including assault and causing injury, as a major category of offending based on prosecutions and convictions.
There is something underneath the individual cases that deserves examination.
I think I understood part of it long before I had the language to explain it.
Growing up and living in Samoa, there were behaviours that frightened me. Aggression could be loud. Threatening language could be casual. Intimidation could be treated as strength. The possibility that a disagreement might become physical did not always seem very far away.
At the time, I did not analyse it. I simply lived inside it.
Then I came to New Zealand.
New Zealand certainly has violence. Its own record of family violence is nothing to boast about, and no sensible person would present this country as some peaceful utopia.
But something changed in my own everyday experience.
I felt less afraid.
Most of the people I encountered did not appear to approach ordinary disagreement as though somebody might have to be punched, threatened or physically dominated. I encountered less of the aggression that I had come to regard almost as background noise.
The distance somehow taught me that what feels normal when you grow up surrounded by it is not necessarily normal at all.
There is now considerable research explaining how this happens.
The 2019–2020 Samoa Demographic and Health and Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey found that nearly 80 per cent of mothers or caregivers of children aged between one and 14 believed physical punishment was necessary to properly raise or educate a child. A recent UNICEF review also noted the extraordinarily high exposure of Samoan children to violent punishment.
The World Health Organization says the evidence on physical punishment is now overwhelming. Children subjected to it are more likely to develop aggressive behaviour, more accepting of violence and at greater risk of perpetrating violence later in life. WHO identifies social norms that glorify violence and cultures in which physical punishment is accepted as factors that help violence reproduce itself.
Violence is not in Samoan blood.
There is no Samoan gene that tells someone to reach for a stick.
Human beings everywhere possess the capacity for aggression. What societies do is teach people what they may do with it.
A child watches.
A father becomes angry and hits.
An older brother answers disrespect with his fists.
An adult tells a child that pain is discipline.
A group of young men learns that toughness means being feared.
A family teaches that an insult must be answered.
Eventually a generation can inherit a behaviour without anyone consciously deciding to teach it.
It becomes simply, “That is how people are.”
And then Facebook arrives.
Social media did not create Samoa’s violence problem. What it has done is expose parts of it that previously remained inside homes, villages and private conversations.
In 2018, after the death of Jeremiah Malaki Tauili’ili following an alleged beating, Samoa Police publicly warned people against posting threatening statements and attempting to take matters into their own hands. That same year, Samoan author Lani Wendt Young described receiving an extraordinary stream of death, rape and other violent threats online.
In January 2025, the Samoa Alliance of Media Practitioners for Development said Samoan journalists covering the country’s political crisis had received death threats and threats against their families and property, primarily through Facebook and private messages.
So when we see violent comments today, we should not simply scroll past them because “people talk like that online.”
It is violent language, and it should not be accepted as normal.
Before somebody raises a fist, violence has already existed as an idea.
Before somebody swings a machete, the mind has already crossed a boundary.
Before somebody types that another human being should be beaten or killed, something has happened internally that has made another person’s suffering acceptable.
That is why I keep returning to something Mosese often teaches his congregation: “o le gāi e tatau ona suia.”
As I understand his teaching, the most important work is the work that must happen inside us. The heart has to be cleaned.
There is an almost strange literary connection here.
Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish author Samoans came to know as Tusitala, spent his final years at Vailima and is buried above Apia on Mount Vaea. Among his most famous works is Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Stevenson was not writing about Samoa, of course, and his novel is considerably more complicated than the popular shorthand we now use.
But the image is difficult to ignore.
Dr Jekyll presents one respectable face to society while Hyde releases impulses that the respectable man conceals.
Social media sometimes feels like our modern laboratory for Hyde.
A Bible verse can sit at the top of a Facebook profile while a threat appears underneath it.
A person can sing hymns on Sunday and write that another human being deserves a beating on Monday.
Someone can speak beautifully about alofa, fa’aaloalo and family, and then become vicious when politics, pride or personal insult enters the conversation.
At some point Christianity requires us to stop separating those people.
They are the same person.
The test of Christian character is not how we behave when everybody agrees with us.
It is what happens to us when somebody humiliates us.
When somebody insults our family.
When our child disobeys.
When our spouse makes us angry.
When a political opponent wins.
When somebody writes something offensive about us on Facebook.
James wrote that everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry because human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires.
That teaching has existed for nearly two thousand years.
Samoa has heard it.
The harder question is whether we have allowed it to change us.
And this is where we have to be willing to use a difficult word.
There is evil in Samoa.
That does not mean Samoa is an evil country. It does not mean Samoan people are inherently violent. There is evil in every human society.
But beating a wife is evil.
Brutalising a child is evil.
Gathering several people to assault one person is evil.
Taking pleasure in another person’s suffering is evil.
Threatening to kill somebody because of politics is evil.
Using fear to control another human being is evil.
We do ourselves no favour by finding softer words for those things simply because the offender is family, a matai, a church member, a respected person or someone from our political side.
A country cannot cure something it is unwilling to name.
Samoa has had generations of pastors. Generations of Sunday schools. Generations of Bibles translated into Samoan. Churches dominate our villages and Christianity is written into our Constitution.
Perhaps the next stage of our Christian development is not another building, another denomination or another declaration that Samoa belongs to God.
Perhaps it is much more difficult.
It is the decision of an angry man not to hit.
The decision of a parent not to beat.
The decision of a young person to walk away.
The decision of someone who has been humiliated not to retaliate.
The decision to type a reply on Facebook, look at it, recognise the hatred in it and delete it.
The decision to stop handing violence from one generation to the next.
Because eventually every Christian has to decide what Christianity is going to mean when nobody is watching.
And every generation of Samoans has to decide what it wishes to pass on.
We can give the next generation the same Bible in the Samoan language and the same violent reflexes that survived alongside it.
Or we can finally begin the harder work Mosese keeps talking about.
The work on the heart.
