Kiyota.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. There are calls for urgent changes to modernize our laws to better protect victims of sexual violence. A new Helen Clark Foundation report identifies several gaps in our laws that need closing and changes to our justice system to reduce under reporting.
Ministry of Justice data estimates about two hundred and nine thousand incidents of sexual assault occur every year, affecting around eighty two thousand victims.
Nearly one in.
Four adults report having experienced sexual assault in their lifetime. Today on the Front Page, Senior researcher Sarah Bell is with us to take us through the report. First off, Sarah, tell me about the purpose of this.
Report, Thanks, Chelsea.
So we know that New Zealander's face really alarming at unacceptual rates of sexual violence, and that causes huge harm to those individuals and to their families and their communities, and also causes huge costs for New Zealand and our society. So we know that nearly one in four New Zealand adults has experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes and that's about eighty two thousand victims a year, which is obviously far too many. So a lot is already happening to
address sexual violence. But our report looked at a number of areas in which New Zealand laws and policies are falling behind and international best practice, or falling behind technological changes, or falling behind the way that society thinks about sexual norms. So we looked at a number of different areas where we felt that was the case. One of the big ones was around very low levels of reporting of sexual violence in New Zealand and the low rates of reported
cases that make it through to a verdict. So we know that only around ten percent of sexual violence is reported to police in New Zealand, and of those reported cases, only about twelve percent to make it through to a conviction within two years. That's a huge amount of sexual
violence going unreported, undealt with perpetrators not being addressed. So we've come up with a number of practical recommendations to support victims and survivors to report sexual violence, to support them through the process, to make trials less traumatic for them, and to provide some alternative pathways where we can address offending without the perpetrators necessarily need to go to prison if that's not what the survivors are actually looking for,
and that might encourage more people to actually come forward if they know that the perpetrator is not necessarily going to face a long jail sentence, but they do want the offending addressed. And we also looked at some ways of modernizing New Zealand laws to update our definition of consent to an affirmative consent or yes means yes consent, to address the harm from sexually explicit deep bakes, and
to eradicate the practice of virginity testing. And we looked at a common theme around education across all of the topics. We looked at people really emphasize the importance of education, both for young people and for society as a whole, and to support the kind of behavioral change that we would like to see.
I suppose a good place to start is what does the law say about consent at the moment?
Sure so people will be familiar I think with the old no means no concept where you respect it if someone says nor, things have been moving in society and in educational settings towards more of a yes men's yes model, which means that you can't assume that someone is consenting to sex just because they don't say no. Now, our law at the moment is a sort of partial affirmative consent model, so you can't assume that someone's consenting just because they don't say no. But the Supreme Court has
said that there are some situations where if there's an the factor in play, you can assume cent sometimes, so they call it passivity plus X. And one of the examples they've given for when that might be the case is relationship expectations. So if the person has consented or not resisted before, maybe you can assume that they're consenting
on this occasion. That can be really problematic. We know that a freeze response is not uncommon when people are sexually assaulted, and we also know that people in adducive relationships have real trouble communicating about consent. So that ability in some cases to assume consent, we think, is a problem that needs to be fixed.
It sounds simple to change that messaging, going from no means no to yes means yes, But how do you actually do that?
It's relatively simple. In law, we've got some pretty sort of simple and concrete changes to the law that we would propose. It's not a hugely radical change, as I say, our laws most of the way they're already, So we would just recommend that instead of saying, you know, a person has not consented just because they don't say or do anything, we recommend saying a person doesn't consent unless they say or do something to communicate consent, and we
don't say how they need to do that. Right, So you don't have to say the word yes, You just have to have given some indication that this is wanted to sex, which is, you know, what we want in society for people to be able to do.
Yeah, I've heard quite a lot of heroin stories that are really motivating me to push on with us and actually show how urgent it is. One of the main stories, or the key stories that I've been saying, is about a thirteen year old girl and I've got a twelve year old boy. So Sophiel was very awfully young. She was deep faked, and we shared amongst her peers at school just year nine, and she attempted suicide on school site.
It was absolutely terrifying and traumatizing, not for the just for the individual, but for her, the peers and the school and the lack of support and resource around this is really terrifying. It would be on the extreme side of things, But other than that case, I've heard of many, many other young, predominantly females where this is happening to her, whether it's at school, university for example, or within the workplace.
We've heard a lot about sexually explicit deep fakes, especially recently. I remember this year at MP Laura McClure held up a naked quote unquote photo of herself in Parliament just to prove how easy it was to manufacture. Now, that was a deep fake image, it wasn't actually a naked photograph of herself. And we know that existing laws are quite behind the eight ball when it comes to this technology. So you guys are saying that we should really speed up our processes on this exactly.
No, you're right. There has been a lot of publicity.
About that encoding through Laura's bravery and holding up that image, and Laura's bill addresses exactly the gap that our project couldified in terms of the way that facts are treated. So we know that these images can be generated really easily, they're extremely realistic. You can take someone's profile picture off their online accounts and turn it into a video of them doing sexually explicit things that of course they have
not done. They haven't consented to it. And we know that the harms from sharing those images without consent can be just as damaging to the individuals as if they were real images, because people can't tell whether they're real or not. And so one of our recommendations is that Laura's they'll be passed. We're recommending a tiny tweak just to make sure that it covers images that it was
so created with consent, that shared without consent. So if you agree with someone that you know you're for fun or whatever, that you're.
Going to make one of these images, but then they.
Share it without your consent, that should, so we think, be covered by the bill. But we were really pleased that that bill was drawn from the ballot just recently and we're hoping it will pass when it comes around.
And the report also mentions the need to a rat kate the practice of virginity testing in New Zealand. Can you tell us what that is? And I believe that the UN is actually called on governments to ban this practice altogether already.
That's right.
So virginity testing relates to the myth that you can tell from an examination whether someone has had sex before. Now that's not actually true.
So the UN and.
Medical practitioners a New Zealand all agree that virginity is a social construct, so a construct that's really important to some people obviously, but you can't establish via an examination whether someone is a so called virgin. Unfortunately, there is a practice still occurring whereby women and usually very young women or children are subjected to a really invasive internal exam to check whether they have supposedly had sex or not.
That obviously causes you know, physical harm in mental trauma to those people when it's occurring, and it's associated with a lot of harms kind of after the fact as well. So the UN has called you some time ago for the practice to be eradicated. We know and dotally that that practice is occurring in New Zealand.
We don't know how.
Much it's occurring or in exactly which communities because it's obviously not something that people talk about, but we think that's enough information to move ahead with in terms of both banning it legally but also supporting community lead campaigns to educate people around the harms and the inaccuracy of
the practice. But what we did with female genital mutilation some years ago, likewise, that's a practice that's not widely practiced in New Zealand and we didn't have good information about when and how it was being practiced, but the fact that it shouldn't be practiced at all was sufficient for us to go ahead and again combine a legal ban with community led education and advocacy to eradicate it.
So when it comes to modernizing our laws, I know that there has been some recent changes to strength and protections for victims of crime and including sexual assault and things like that include you know, not having to give evidence in court, being able to video response or be in a different room and be a vled or or audio visual linked into a court room, for instance. And then there are some changes to suppression laws things like that. So there has been kind of steps, but would you
call them baby steps? Should we be taking bigger leaps when it comes to this.
It's great to see those steps being taken, and to that I would add one of the other recent developments that was relevant to our research was the Stalking and Harassment Bill it's just passed, and that's relevant to the deep Facts.
Legislation.
Again, we think it's great that deep facts are covered by that bill. So if someone is using sexual explicit deep facts to harass and stalk someone, then that's an avenue to pursue them. But we still think they should be banned altogether without having to demonstrate that someone's talking
or harassing you. Likewise, with the other law changes, and we didn't know, Project didn't look into all of the aspects like name suppression for example, that were covered by the recent changes, but it is always positive to see steps being taken. We've recommended another a number of other ones, including rolling out some trial practices that are already used in the sexual violence courts, for example, which were piloted an Auckland and FUGA day, rolling those out throughout the country.
Requiring judges to be accredited and trained when overseeing sexual violence cases so that they're better equipped to handle cross examination. That's sort of creating greater trauma for victims, which we know is a real issue, and better address rate myths that come up around what real victims do or don't do, which again we know don't really reflect the way that sexual violence takes place.
Yeah, and I mean it was it's shocking to know that it was only until quite recently, and by recent I mean within the last couple of years where you could ask a child who had been let's face it, raped on the stand whether they liked it or not, and that was kind of common practice amongst you know, questioning children in these kind of cases. And so those those kind of things still crop up and you go, huh.
I can't still happening.
That was a doctor Anahi who authored the consent part of our report. You know, she obviously is an expert on these issues. I am not. And when I read that part of the report that children were you know, up until very recently able to be questioned about whether
they had consented to sex. Because of the different ways our law was structured around charging sexual violation versus charging sexual interaction with the minor, you could get a bigger sentence via charging sexual violation, which meant they could be questioned about consent. That has been fixed for under twelves, and the latest law, which is a really positive step, it's still the case for young people age twelve to fifteen.
We haven't necessarily recommended fixing that because it's slightly more complicated for people of that age, but it does show why the consent changes that we're recommending are really important, because you can imagine for young people communicating about consent is pretty challenging.
Primarily that I did not want my family did it.
I don't want people to look at me and think, oh, how sad or how hope breaking.
You didn't tell those things.
If there were so many ways in where I could be discredited that I didn't want to put myself through that.
So we've spoken about before. The report dives into issues around underreporting and attrition, of course, and there's a multitude of reasons why there is under reporting, and you won't understand those reasons until you're actually in the situation. And even when you're in the situation, every situation is different, and every person is different, and every person's response is different.
And I said that I found that the report said current options available under the criminal justice system do not meet survivors definitions of justice or what they think is an appropriate response to the offending. Now, straight off the bat, I remember, you know, when I'm not picking up any story in particular here, but when you say so X has been charged with rape, X has been sentenced to a year's home detention or something, and then you've got
the public outraged saying this isn't good enough. And then on the flip side, though, and what we hear about less often is sometimes victims not wanting the perpetrator to go to court and to have You know, there are all different kind of intricacies in how people want justice, and so was that an interesting part of your report and of the research learning about different forms of justice and what victims actually want and how it differs across the spectrum.
Absolutely no, and that was Emily Henderson who led this part of the research looked really widely at research from a number of countries into a number of different situations, and it was something we talked around quite a bit, as none of the solutions that we propose or the adjustments that we propose would fix things for everyone, because, as you say, everyone's situation is different, right, there are people who want to see longer penalties and jail penalties.
That's something that the research suggests doesn't necessarily reduce offending particularly, But what we do know is that there are a number of people who don't come forward with the sexual violence stories because they don't want the perpetrator to go to prison. You can imagine all kinds of reasons for at family relationships obviously, and again it's not to say that everyone who has a family relationship with the offender doesn't want them to go to prison. It really is
an individual story. We know that Indigenous people generally and maldi don't find incarceration to necessarily be the most desirable outcome. Again, not always, but sometimes you know, there's a preference to deal with things.
In a different way.
And so one of the recommendations we made is for alternative pathways that don't say people shouldn't go to jail, but they say we should offer alternative options to encourage more people to come forward to address the offending in a way that meets people's justice needs. So that might be through a restorative justice, which is already available in some cases, we're suggesting it be expanded, but also the idea of treatment courts, which we currently have for drug
and alcohol offenses. But Emily's suggested that in some cases sexual offending is quite treatable, and you know, we should look at models where instead of going to prison, people are sentenced to treatment and then they sort of report back to the judge after that treatment's carried out.
So again, none of these things is meant.
To be for everyone, but if you offer more options along the way, then we might pick up more cases.
And so at the moment, what are young people taught about sexual violence, sexual consent, or even to sex in general in school?
The problem is we don't know, and so there is a curriculum, but school boards consult with their communities around what it's taught, and what we understand from our research is that it's very patchy across the country from school to school what kids are learning, who's delivering their education,
and therefore what ideas they're coming away with. And there have been some recent updates to the curriculum, so again that's kind of at a high level what's suggested, but again we don't know what will end up being taught under those What we do know is what they're missing from the curriculum, which is content around what kids are
actually being exposed to. So we're recommending age appropriate content around things like pornography, digital harm, you know, particularly the kind of harm that can be delivered via AI, via the deep fax, issue online companions and.
Things like that.
And there's also not really anything in the curriculum at the moment around intimate partner violence, you know, how to understand whether you're in a violent relationship. So one of the messages we heard from a few different angles and we were talking to people for the project, was a desire, including from young people, for there to be more consistently across the education.
You know, people want to know that their peers are being.
Taught the same things, particularly an environment with this so much misogynistic, awful messaging out there now, we need to be countering that in some way with real information and with positive messaging about healthy relationships.
It seems wild to me that there still isn't kind of a curriculum that's across the board everyone. I kind of mentioned it in the newsroom because I went through sex ed Fath a couple of decades ago, and it was a Catholic or girls' school, so it was abstinence. But I kind of chatted to a couple of other people in the newsroom saying, what was your sex head
like at school? And they'd be like, yeah, we had a couple like this is how to use a condom, and then the next lesson would be like fruit and veggies like so it was a part of their health kind of group. And especially it's wild to me that you know, in the last couple of decades it hasn't
actually moved It doesn't seem like it's moved on. But at the same time, there is more access to pornography, more access to quite hardcore pornography, and we do know so much more about relationships and lgbt Q relationships and all of this stuff that these kids are having to navigate with and they're still, presumably and this is anecdotally learning about condoms and periods.
Which is also important, but yeah, absolutely, And for a start, there's so much to cover, and we know that teachers have a lot to cover already, and we know that some of these issues are sensitive for families, that people have different beliefs around these issues.
There's not kind of one single truth about some of these things that everybody would agree on. But we don't think it's right for kids to get through school, and you know, young people to get through school and not be aware of these issues and will only be aware of them through what they're exposed to online, right, because you can't really keep young people away.
From these issues.
Almost all of them are online, and we know their efforts to address that. It's not that we didn't really look at age related measures in our report, but what we did look at is the fact that the stuff is happening anyway. Kids are getting access to this material, particularly online, whether it's viewing pornography, whether it's hearing these kind of, as I say, misogynistic messages from online influences about women's place and.
What real men do.
And we think it's really really important that the young people are given consistent messaging around.
How to navigate that and how to.
Have healthy relationships and how to go to if they are encountering things that make them uncomfortable or if they are victims of inject fact sexual abuse, that kind of thing. It's not something that parents are necessarily equipped to teach them about. I say, as a parent of a very young person at the moment, but you know, I've learned a huge amount through this project that most parents don't have access to all of the information.
Right.
Well, thanks so much for joining us, Sarah, Thank you, Chelsea.
That's it for this episode. Of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzidherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Jane Yee and Richard Martin, who is also our editor. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.