Police have charged almost five people a day with strangling or suffocating their partners since a new family violence law came into force criminalising such acts in December.

New Zealand has the worst rate of family and intimate-partner violence in the developed world and police are called to an incident every four minutes.

The new legislation criminalising strangulation and suffocation was brought in in a bid to curb the problem.

Previously there was no separate offence for strangulation as it was treated as assault.

The first person was charged the day it came into force on December 3.

Since then 416 people in total have been charged, around 33 per week and almost five each day.

And major Kiwi building company Arrow Construction has gone into voluntary administration.