Katie Hogan

And many victims don't even speak up. Often victims of stalking behaviour are vulnerable, afraid. Their voices may not be particularly loud when they raise issues.

Katie is a King's Council and she's not surprised at the lack of action in Pieta's case. In a situation of being stalked by not necessarily a stranger but someone you don't know particularly well or someone who's just fixated on you or someone who you've had a coffee with,

The feedback she got does not surprise me. The harassment act regime isn't really fit for purpose. It's not nimble. It doesn't provide police with any nip things in the bud powers, whereas this new act, as well as having a much stronger bite, also provides that warning power and the ability potentially to arrest people

I'm not aware of any strident criticisms of the new offence provision, although I

I do note the new definition of stalking is very wide. It's much wider than the definitions we have under existing offence law like the Harassment Act I was just talking about. For example, stalking occurs if there are two specified incidents within a two-year period.

under the existing law it's two incidents in a 12-month period, so you can see the definition has widened out to two years. Also, the definition of what constitutes an incident is wide in the extreme. All sorts of problematic behaviours are included in it.

A potential criticism, but not in the same vein, in relation to a warning power that's been given to police under the new provisions. So if a first stalking incident is reported, police have the power to warn the alleged stalker that their behaviour is constituting a stalking incident. And thereafter, after that warning, the person who's doing the stalking is taken to know

That they are stalking and the chances of them being successfully prosecuted are much higher once they have that knowledge. Some victims groups are concerned about that power to warn and the implications to a victim's safety once the person has been warned that they've reported to the police.

stalkers statistically can escalate if authorities are reported to. So there has now been built into the new provision that the complainant, the person who's made the complaint to the police about the stalking, has to get notice if the police are going to issue that warning so the complainant can take necessary steps to protect him or herself.

There has been some, actually a variety of laws available to date to deal with stalking type behaviours, including in the Crimes Act, but police have had to try and sort of squash those prosecutions into offences that bear other names. For example, in the Crimes Act you can be prosecuted for any assault that takes place, you can be prosecuted for threats,

You can be prosecuted for blackmail, you can be prosecuted for fraud, so sometimes stalking behaviour falls into those categories. There are also some more stalking-like offences already in existence, but they're not in the Crimes Act. For example, there is an offence under our Harassment Act called criminal harassment that only has a two-year maximum penalty. There are also some offences under...

the Harmful Digital Communications Act, maximum penalties of two years imprisonment. And then you can be prosecuted if you breach a protection order. Now protection orders are made under the Family Violence Act. They only apply to people in family relationships. That's a definition that includes partners or ex-partners. If you breach a protection order made under the Family Violence Act, there's a three-year maximum penalty

Or people who aren't in family relationships can apply for restraining orders under the Harassment Act. That's a civil proceeding and it comes with the usual hurdles and inefficiencies related to civil proceedings. If you breach a restraining order made under the Harassment Act the first time, your maximum penalty is six months' imprisonment. The third or subsequent time, you can be imprisoned for up to two years.

What I'm trying to show is that there are a number of existing options that stalking behaviour can and has in the past been squashed under, but this is the first time we have a dedicated stalking offence, and importantly it's being housed in our most important criminal act, the act that sets out the most serious offences in New Zealand, and that's the Crimes Act.

stalking offence provision is that police will be mandated to look out for the type of complaints that Ms Yakubi made. Just so your listeners are aware, her case is a sad but good demonstration of what stalking behaviour is and what the potential catastrophic outcomes of it are.

So Mr Singh was a security guard. He worked in, I think, a Queen Street area address, standing outside the premises he worked. He engaged Ms Yakubi in conversation one day. He was successful in having her agree to sit down for a coffee.

He then, from that point, contacted her using the social media application Instagram. Eventually she blocked him through Instagram. He then created a myriad of new accounts and continued to contact her. He started to threaten Ms Yakubi in his messages. He threatened to kidnap her.

saying he would give her 365 days to fall in love with him. He threatened to throw acid on her face. He also added Ms Yakubi's family and friends as social media links and attempted to communicate with Ms Yakubi through those intermediaries.

Ms Yakubi made an online report to police complaining about harassment. About a month after that online report, Ms Yakubi noticed Mr Singh following her at a mall and she asked a security officer for assistance. That same month, in December 22, Mr Singh used a social media account to send Ms Yakubi a video taken outside her home demonstrating he knew her address.

At that point she went to Henderson Police Statement and made a complaint about stalking and provided police with screenshots of the threatening messages. It was very shortly after that that she was stabbed and killed. So as I've said it's hopeful that this new serious charge and the education of police, the judiciary, Defence Council and ultimately defendants that will come through it