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Chapter 1: What recent legislation has been introduced to criminalize stalking?
Mr Speaker, stalking and harassment is vicious, sinister and can be deadly. After years of discussion, this Government has strengthened the law to put a stop to this insidious behaviour. After decades and decades and decades of advocacy and campaigning and
I guess above all else, woman experiencing stalking and harassment and abuse and discrimination and harm in real life, mentally, physically, virtually.
that we're finally here passing New Zealand's first bill that defines and acknowledges stalking as a form of abuse. For years, stalking victims in New Zealand have been told there is only so much the law can do. Even as fears escalated, as behaviours became obsessive, and when victims believed they were in serious danger.
I remember calling him and telling him the situation and he just did not believe me. This is Pieta, a stalking victim who met a brick wall when telling her manager that a colleague was stalking her. I was getting message requests on Facebook from accounts that at the time I didn't realise were fake but...
They were fake profiles and they were of my boyfriend at the time's friends. He was in Europe at the time and it was a pretty fresh relationship. So all the messages were basically saying that he was cheating on me with all these people that he knew. Pieta never made a formal complaint about her stalker. Hers was considered a minor case. He ended up...
I was driving to my house after finding my address online and he drove to my house, wrote letters and dropped them in my letterbox. And a police officer friend of hers told her it wouldn't be worth it for her going through the legal system. But to give some perspective here, her case might have been considered minor, but it cast a huge shadow over her daily life.
Because Pieta never went to court, we legally can't tell you her stalker's name. But we know who he is, and we know what he has been convicted of. The list is not short, and he's currently in prison. In Pieta's case, the situation didn't escalate, but often it does. Later in the podcast, we'll hear about a woman whose stalker murdered her.
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.
We'll come back to Pieta's story later in the podcast. But first, I'm Coco Lance, and that's lawyer Katie Hogan. And today on The Detail, she's going to talk us through the law change that comes into force today that will make stalking a specific criminal offence for the very first time.
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Chapter 2: How have stalking victims historically been treated by the legal system?
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
and control the behaviour of someone during a prosecution more effectively through bail conditions and the like. I'm assuming that this new legislation will be well received across the legal sector and for those within the police force. Can you kind of foresee any barriers with the implementation of this legislation?
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.
Let's take a step back and look at what the situation used to be like. Because even though there was no specific stalking legislation, there were provisions that could catch such behaviour. What is being changed is our Crimes Act and some new sections are going in there making a new crime, the crime of stalking.
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,
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of the new stalking law for police and victims?
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.
Katie points to the 2022 murder of 21-year-old Whasana Yakubi, who was subjected to relentless stalking by 30-year-old Kanwa Palsing, as an example of why advocates pushed for these new laws and better training across the justice system.
When you go to police to report you've got a stalker, you expect them to take it seriously. But for Auckland law student, Farzana Yakubi, they didn't. Even after she reported her stalker three times. And two weeks later, she was dead. And the man that she reported as her stalker had become her murderer. So the advantage of this new, strong...
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.
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Chapter 4: What changes have been made to the definition of stalking?
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
should result in better responses to complaints that involve these what might seem relatively low-level, innocuous behaviours. The improvements that I see this new offence creating, firstly as I've said it's in the Crimes Act, it's in the most serious criminal act in our statutory regime. It has a five year maximum penalty so that in itself will make a big difference.
It also has this extended very wide definition of what constitutes stalking behaviour. Police are given the warning notice power, which is a new power that might nip this type of behaviour in the bud in hopefully the majority of cases.
The more serious nature of the crime may well motivate police to arrest and oppose bail or require strict bail conditions for people who are charged with an offence of this nature.
If people are charged with low, offences with low maximum penalties, and if they're unlikely to ever receive a sentence of imprisonment as a result of those low maximum penalties, it's very difficult to ask a court successfully to remand someone in custody.
or to remand them on very strict bail conditions, for example, electronic monitoring, the more serious the offence and the more likely a sentence of imprisonment at the end of the prosecution, the easier it will be to argue for those more strict restrictions on someone's liberty while they're being prosecuted.
The new offence incorporates new flow-on effects. If someone's convicted of a stalking offence, the court can order disposal of intimate visual recordings as a result of that conviction. And also anyone convicted of a stalking offence is unable to hold a firearms licence for 10 years. So there are these additional risk mitigation factors with the new offence.
The education factors should also flow on into sentencings of...
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Chapter 5: How do real-life stalking cases highlight the need for legal reform?
other offences, the more traditional offences, the assaults, the sexual violations, the indecent assaults, that have stalking type factors in the background. Those factors may well have been discounted by sentencing judges as irrelevant in the past, but the stalking offence that's now introduced should increase awareness and increase the recognition of those factors.
as risk factors and culpability enhancing factors. When Pieta was 20 years old, she began a new job at a car dealership. She says the last thing she expected was to leave that job less than a year later. But a few days into the new gig, an anonymous online account began sending her abusive, explicit messages, including personal details about her life.
After some investigating, Pieta discovered something unsettling. The person behind the account was a colleague twice her age, working alongside her every day. Someone who, it turns out, had a long history of stalking. I knew someone that was a policeman or an investigator and he did one Google search and sent it to my mum and my mum showed me in the car and
it was just flooded with pictures of him on google images like photos of him in court it was just everywhere and my heart sank because I was just confused as to how this man got a job
um especially being in and out of prison so many times and it's quite a big company so you'd expect them to do a good background check on people like this but I was living with my parents at the time because I was still quite young and they basically said you're not going back to that job because like they didn't feel safe with me there so I was really excited about that job as well and I
I had to leave, sadly. Did you actually go to the police? The most I did was get my policeman friend to file reports, but the reports was it. So it was on file, like all the information, all the screenshots, all the letters that had written me were all on file, but that was all really.
So did you receive any support from the police from there? So they obviously were aware of what was going on and they had examples and evidence of what he was doing to you but you obviously said your police officer friend kind of insinuated that nothing was going to be able to come of this so did you get any more support from anyone else and what did that kind of look like when you were asking for help from those around you?
Honestly I did not get any other help except for like the friends and family around me just like that helped me like reassure me that it would all be okay but I just sort of let it like let him because I was just ignoring his messages the whole time maybe he thought that I
didn't even see them so he just sort of gave up but yeah I didn't get any other help except for just like family support really. Was it that the law itself wasn't fit for purpose like they physically were saying to you we can't actually do anything about this situation and the evidence that they have was it
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Chapter 6: What are the expected outcomes of the new stalking legislation?
anything could happen and i just couldn't believe that this sort of stuff wasn't illegal there's certain levels to stalking and like his is like a pretty severe case like this man's face is plastered all over google images when you search him up so you'd think that they just leave him in there
You are someone who I think seems you have come out of this awful experience with a strong head on your shoulders and, you know, you're living your life now. But how are things today and how do you feel, I guess, about the new legislation that will be coming into place to finally criminalise stalking?
I found, yeah, I was very disappointed that I couldn't just easily go to the police and they'd just take him away. Like I said before, I knew a police officer and he basically just told me it wouldn't be worth going to court with him because it would be years of just stress of going in and out and especially at the age I was, like, it just wouldn't be worth it. But it did start...
whānau tātou tātou tātou tātou tātou tātou tātou tātou tātou tātou tātou He was getting locked up or going to court because he'd done it to eight other women after me. I really do not wish it upon anyone. It's just not, you never know what they can do.
I thankfully had a very minor case from him, like he didn't do anything extreme but it could get worse. Katie Hogan says New Zealand has been lagging on legislation like this. All the overseas jurisdictions that we compare ourselves to have lagged.
these offences in place, most of them with five-year maximum penalties, a couple with 10-year maximum penalties. Given our appalling family violence statistics, there must have been some pressure for some time for this to be acted on. I mentioned earlier that I have experience in the Harassment Act restraining order space where people can take positive steps to
to get in front of a prosecution and get a restraining order against someone to stop the harassment in its tracks. That jurisdiction is difficult. It can be slow. It can be costly. The district court
isn't as well prepared as, for example, the family court in dealing with these fraught interpersonal prevention measures. So the family court, for example, regularly grants protection orders under the Family Violence Act.
The restraining order regime in the district court is not used so regularly, so sometimes the registry is not very good at dealing with them efficiently or safely. And there has no doubt been agitation about that issue and the need to protect people for some time.
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