Nina Funnell

The night of the rape, Madeline had fled his apartment and called 1-800-RESPECT and then called Full Stop Australia.

Both 1-800-RESPECT and Full Stop Australia were subpoenaed for the phone calls or the contacts that she made to their services that night.

1-800-RESPECT didn't even check in with Maddie before handing over word for word, verbatim, the entire transcript of that contact.

Full Stop Australia did challenge their subpoena and were successful.

So what the Keep Counselling Confidential campaign is all about is to say that

In this country, sexual assault survivors who access counselling make the assumption that that is confidential and they should be able to make that assumption because counselling is not safe if it's not confidential.

People are not going to open up if they think that anyone could eavesdrop, let alone their rapist eavesdropping in on what they're talking about.

Madeline Lane's contact to 1-800-RESPECT was not only read by her offender, Boyd Kramer, it was actually read out word for word in court.

So basically the idea of the campaign is to say that we need an absolute privilege or an absolute protection on counselling notes in these matters.

So in the same way that, you know, if you go and talk to your lawyer, you have client attorney privilege.

What you say in that room is sacred.

It's safe.

It's protected.

Likewise, you know, some people go to their priests.

That can be a privileged conversation.

It can be protected.

If people come and speak to me as a journalist, I can actually invoke media shield laws to refuse to hand that over.

And yet if you go to a sexual assault counsellor right now, that conversation is not protected.

Scary.

It is.