Christchurch man Matt Brown set up a barber shop after the 2011 earthquake, and realised just listening can lead to a lot of good

'Everyone just wants to be loved': the New Zealand barber helping cut domestic violence

There are the hardened criminals. The patched gang members. The older men who watched their father beat their mother before turning on them. The young boys whose mothers drink and tell them they are unwanted. The alcoholics, the drug addicts, the gamblers.

They all take their seat in New Zealand barber Matt Brown’s chair. And they talk. And Brown listens, offers advice and support where he can and, hopefully, help his customers turn their lives around.

“I am a good listener,” says Brown. “I cut their hair, and I listen. It’s my greatest gift as a barber.”

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Brown says he fell into his calling by accident. After the deadly Christchurch earthquakes of 2011 he set up a barber shop in a shed in his backyard and named it My Father’s Barber.

Brown soon developed a reputation as a bit of an artist with the clippers and quickly realised his clients needed more than a haircut. “I began to see these men and boys were coming to me because they felt that the barber shop was a safe place for them,” he says.

The men I have had sit there and cry, the toughest men, just sobbing Matt Brown, barber

“I would start cutting their hair, and I would establish a relationship with them, I would ask them how they were, and I would let them talk.”

There is something special about a barber’s chair, Brown says, that allows even the toughest men to drop their barriers. “I think it has a lot to do with a person’s head being so sacred, the act of someone touching them, taking care of them, making them look good, it leads them to open up.”

No topics are off limits and Brown says he talks about everything from sport to what’s on television to a client’s personal struggles, addictions, their fears or childhood traumas such as domestic violence and abandonment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matt Brown came from an abusive home. Photograph: Supplied

“Not many things shock me now,” he says. “The things I have heard, the men I have had sit there and cry, the toughest men, just sobbing, some probably for the first time.”

Brown says he sees a lot of himself in the customers who sit in his chair. “I grew up in an abusive home and my father would beat my mother,” Brown says.

I have had clients completely turn their lives around ... They’ve quit gangs or stopped drinking Matt Brown

“You know that Kiwi movie Once Were Warriors? That’s what home was like for us, and the worst thing was my mother would go out, go to church, with all these bruises and no one ever said anything to her, no one did anything to help us and I still think about how things could have turned out differently if someone did.”

But what Brown does is much more than offering a sympathetic ear. When you consider that New Zealand has some of the highest rates of reported family violence in the world, particularly intimate partner violence and child abuse, it is not hard to see that his barber’s chair can literally become a matter of life or death for not only his customers, but their families, too.

“I have had clients completely turn their lives around,” Brown says. “They’ve quit gangs or stopped drinking, they’ve gone back to their wives or partners, they’ve learned that domestic violence is not OK, they’ve healed past wounds and forgiven others and themselves,” Brown says. “All this from a haircut, it’s pretty amazing.”

Underpinning Brown’s barbershop counselling has been the idea that the women in his customers’ lives are not responsible for the healing, and that men must “own their own stuff” before any positive change in their lives can occur.

Along with his clients, they came up with the phrase “She is not your rehab” to paraphrase their philosophy, and the idea has now become a nationwide movement. They sell t-shirts to spread their message, and a relationship podcast and book are in the works.

Brown says his aim is to create a generation of Kiwi men who can break the cycle of family violence and raise sons who do not go on to abuse women.

“The biggest lesson I’ve learned from this is that everyone is the same, everyone just wants to be loved.”