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Chapter 1: What traumatic experience did Nina Funnell survive?
This is part two of my conversation with Nina Fennell. Before you listen to this, make sure you've listened to part one. There's a link in our show notes. Before you listen today, this episode contains stories of child sexual abuse, sexual assault and suicide. I want to move on to another huge campaign that you worked on, the Let Her Speak, which turned into the Let Us Speak campaign.
Where did that start for you?
Okay. So interestingly, that actually also started in that year of university reporting. Did it?
Chapter 2: How did Nina Funnell become an advocate for victims?
Yeah. So back in 2016, 17, when I was doing all of that work, I got a phone call from the student women's offices at the University of Tasmania to tell me that there was a convicted sex offender living on campus in one of the residential colleges. I think it was John Flynn Residential College.
Um, and he was an elderly convicted child sex offender and his name's Nicholas Bester and he was living in co-ed facilities and he was making a number of the students on campus feel very, very uncomfortable and they didn't understand why he was living alongside 17 and 18 year old girls in, and I mean, they had shared bathroom facilities as well. And he was, I think a 68 year old man at the time.
Um,
Chapter 3: What campaigns has Nina led to support victim-survivors?
Anyway, I said, yeah, I'll do that story as part of the 52. And then I said, but I just want to check, how do his original victims, because he'd been to jail, I said, do you know who that is? Do you know how they feel about this? Do you know if they feel comfortable with the story coming out? And they said, yes, her name's Grace Tame. She lives in L.A.,
And I said, okay, well, I'd like to check in with her first about how she feels about me reporting on him leaving at college. And also if she'd like to say anything. And I made contact with Grace, who he had abused as a 15-year-old schoolgirl when he was her maths teacher at St. Michael's Collegiate Girl School in Hobart.
Chapter 4: What challenges did Nina face while advocating for legal reform?
And Grace said that, yes, absolutely, she was happy for the story to go ahead. And actually her mum, Penny, was a mature age student on campus at the time and had been running into her daughter's offender. So you can imagine, so that was impacting her right to access education. So Grace also said that she would like to be quoted in the article.
And so, you know, I wrote up this piece and as with every article, we run it past our legal department first before we publish it. And my lawyer, Gina McWilliams came back and she said, the piece is good to go, but you can't name Grace. And I was like, well, why the offender's been convicted. He's gone to jail. There's no defamation.
There's no subjudice or contempt issues, you know, the normal stuff we come up against. And she said, well, there's a thing called Section 194K of the Evidence Act in Tasmania, which prohibits survivors from being identified unless they go to court and get a court order. And I remember going, well, can we do that? Can we get her a court order if she wants to be named?
And Gina was like, look, if she wants to be named that badly, we can do it.
Chapter 5: How did the Let Her Speak campaign impact survivor voices?
But, you know, it's a bit of work. And I went away and I thought about it and I was like, so wait, every survivor in that state who wants to tell their story has to go to court or has to get the media organisation to go to court first before they can tell their story. That doesn't seem right. And Grace was 22 at the time and I'd gone public when I was 23.
And it suddenly occurred to me that had my assault happened in Hobart instead of Sydney, I wouldn't have been able to tell my story. I would have had to, or I would have at least had to go to court, get a court order. And that's, that can be, you know, up to $10,000.
I was going to say, it's a lot of money.
Yeah, so we did Grace's work. I went to Grace and I said, how would you feel about us getting you a court order? We'll cover the cost. So we did the work and Gina did it. And it cost about, I think it was about $9,200 to do it. Now, if the individual survivor was expected to wear the cost of that, that's outrageous. But more than that, I started to go...
Chapter 6: What legal changes resulted from Nina's advocacy efforts?
Well, this is really problematic because it means that the media get to pick and choose which survivors end up telling their story based on where they're, you know, and it also means that commercial media, media with big deep pockets are the ones that are going to be able to tell these stories.
What happens if a survivor doesn't want to tell their story to mainstream media and they just want to tell it through media? own blog or through an autobiography, does that mean that they then wear the cost? And even more than that, I was realizing this actually re-inscribes the victim survivor back into the criminal justice system, which was often very traumatic to begin with.
And it puts them in this position where they have to ask a judge for permission to say their own name. Like it's so paternalistic.
It's also making them feel shame when there is no shame at all.
there. 100%. Also, the offender doesn't need a court order to tell what they want to say. Nicholas Bester, the offender, had actually gone and done a 17-minute interview with a woman called Bettina Arndt, where they had actually mocked Grace and made light of the offending. I ended up speaking to my editors at the time and saying, I think this is more than a story.
I actually think we should campaign on this. They said, all right, go away and put together a pitch. I That was an interesting process in and of itself because I remember thinking like, you know, I'm running for a national outlet. I'm trying to draw attention to a law that frankly no one in Tasmania even seems to think is that much of a problem. No one was calling it a gag law at the time.
They were just calling it, in fact, the local sexual assault service in Tasmania thought it was a good thing that survivors had to go to court and ask for permission because they thought that that would stop exploitative journalism by adding in an extra step. It was bizarre.
But they asked survivors about it?
Yeah, very good question.
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Chapter 7: How does Nina address the confidentiality of counseling for survivors?
So I was like, how do I design a campaign? My one and only case study is living in LA and can't be named or photographed. So it's very hard to humanize the issue when you can't name and photograph people.
Mm-hmm.
So I'm writing about the smallest state, which people around the country don't necessarily click on articles about. How do I make this national news and how do I get people to care about it? And so the answer to that was the first thing that we decided to do was to call it a gag law. It immediately kind of constructs what the problem is. Yeah.
The second thing was I decided that I would interview victim survivors from every other state that didn't have gag laws, who had already gone public, to ask them why that had been important for them to be able to tell their story on their own terms. So I photographed and I got them all to hold a sign that said, let her speak. So that became the name of the campaign, hashtag let her speak.
So people like Saxon Mullins, Tara Moss. And in the end, I interviewed 14 survivors from around the whole country who had gone public to ask them why.
you know why why was that important for them and because i'd been doing all this work with university survivors a number of those 14 were themselves university from universities so the campaign actually really um was born out of those series of events and when we launched on day one I'd partnered with 60 Minutes.
We did it as this big sort of news.com.au slash 60 Minutes launch to say there is this absurd law in Tasmania. Here are all these survivors around the country calling out Tasmania. And so that makes it national.
Makes it national. Makes everyone else care.
And it also means that you've got faces. You've got other survivors. And then it becomes a survivor-led campaign. And I decided to also include my own name and story in that as well as a survivor to say, you know, at 23, telling my own story had actually been really important for me because it was how I reclaimed some of my agency in a moment when I felt very powerless.
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Chapter 8: What future campaigns is Nina planning to continue her advocacy?
And I want to give credit to all of the survivors in the campaign that did that.
Such an amazing effort that you were able to get those laws changed. What was that campaign like for you? It sounds exhausting.
Yeah, I mean, like the worst part was the week that I got notification that the Tasmanian law was going to change, I also got notification that Victoria had just introduced a gag law, the exact gag law that we'd just gotten changed in Tasmania and And it went one step further.
Not only were victim survivors in Victoria now required to go to court and get court permission to tell their stories, but any women or anyone, sorry, I should say, who had been the victim of sexual assault and murder or anyone who was now a deceased victim of sexual assault could no longer be named.
So people like Jill Maher, Eurydice Dixon, Aya Masawa, overnight it became illegal to publish their names because including by their own family members on memorial pages and so on. So when I got that news and sidebar, I'd also just found out I was pregnant. Information overload.
I just, my heart sank and I knew that this was going to be a really different fight in Victoria because Tasmania and the Northern Territory are very small jurisdictions population-wise.
Yeah.
And these laws had been on the books forever in Tasmania and the NT. No one was particularly attached to them or wanted to defend them. Whereas in Victoria... the Attorney General, Jill Hennessy, at the time, had actually just passed and introduced this gag law, which meant that she was going and her government was going to defend it as a good thing. But why did they think it is a good thing?
We now think that what they did was an error in drafting the legislation, which was so sloppy and so embarrassing for them that they had to double down and defend it. But The other thing that was really different in Victoria, Victoria has a very, very large population of victim survivors who have already been very public and active at that time.
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