Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hilda.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. There's no
doubt about it. Being a parliamentarian is a public facing,
high stress, demanding job. Your exposed, scrutinized, and your decisions
(00:25):
affect the entire country for better or worse. But do
the high stakes constitute the abuse they face some on
a daily basis. Recently we've seen Minister Shane Jones and
his wife Dot accosted at an airport, increased security for
Mayors Wayne Brown and Tanya tap Cell, and death threats
aimed at Green MP Benjamin Doyle. But those are all
(00:48):
just stories from the last month. University of Otago research
out today shows female MPs are being assaulted with weapons,
threatened with rape and subjected to deaths and it's become
commonplace today on the Front Page, Senior author and Professor
Susanna Everyparma is with us to talk about whether it's
high time to better protect our elected officials. Susanna tell
(01:16):
me about this research. How many MPs were spoken to, So.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
We spoke to eleven women and just for context, this
research was a follow up from our survey in twenty
twenty two when we recruited both male and female MPs,
and we found that almost all forms of abuse against
MPs had increased, but the nature of abuse directed at
(01:41):
women MPs seemed substantively.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Different, right, And what kinds of experiences did they describe?
Speaker 3 (01:47):
So they talked about experiencing much more personal forms of abuse.
So they were at significantly higher risks of certain types
of social media harassment, including gendered abuse, actualized comments, but
also really nasty stuff like rape threats and possibly worst
of all, threats towards family members like their children. So,
(02:09):
just to give you some stats, women were twice as
likely to receive death threats as male MPs and almost
six times as likely to have their family threatened. So
in this research that we did, we did in depth
interviews with women MPs across the political spectrum, asking them
about these experiences and.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
What did you find in that respect, because you say,
across the political spectrum, it doesn't matter what color you are,
basically as to what kind of threats you get.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
It doesn't know. So we found that harassment occurred whether
you were in a right leaning or a left leaning party,
but it did appear that it was worse, you know,
for younger women and for non white women as well.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
I have had to take things a lot less personally
than when I started out. I used to read every
comment and take it to heart. And you have to
rise above a lot of that. You have to take
honest criticism from where, from the places that matter to you,
from the people who put you into power in the
first place, and that ability to endure those attacks requires
(03:17):
you to stay grounded. That might be the bush, that
might be getting enough sleep, that might be cuddles with
a look upon it, whatever it is. I think we
can all benefit from balancing the stress of the job
a bit better.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
One MP's comment stood out to me. They said, it's relentless,
there's not a break from it. There's not a single
post that I've posted that doesn't have misogynistic comments or
racist comments on it. And then you add to that
death threats. No one, No one prepares you for that.
Should parliamentarians be more prepared for these kinds of situations?
(03:51):
Are they given any training or guidance at all?
Speaker 3 (03:53):
That was one of the things that the women said
is that they wished at the beginning, when they were started,
that they had have had more orientation and cyber safety training.
And one example that one woman said that initially she
started getting this really nasty stuff and people had told her,
you know, ignore it, delete it, so she deleted and blocked.
But then when it got to the point that she
(04:16):
did not feel safe and needed to get police involvement,
she hadn't kept any of the evidence. So women were saying, yes,
that they wished that they had been better I guess
orientated and trained when they got into their roles.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
And you mentioned the previous survey, and I'll just radle
off a few statistics from that in that ninety eight
percent of the fifty four MP's surveyed reported experiencing harassment,
forty percent said that they were threatened with physical violence,
fourteen percents with sexual violence, and nineteen percent told the
researchers threats were made against family members.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Is it getting worse, Yes, it's getting worse. So there's
no doubt that there has been a change. And we
were able to compare our twenty twenty two findings with
similar research that we did in twenty fourteen, and the
volume and severity and general nastiness has increased, and people
felt that the rest had significantly increased to them as well,
(05:13):
and this went beyond MPs. So in the twenty fourteen
study there were about twenty eight percent of staff or
family members who were reported to feel afraid. This had
increased up to eighty percent in twenty twenty two. So
it was impacting not just on parliamentarians but on those
around them, and that concern them a great deal, and
(05:35):
people really worried about the safety of their staff, you know,
and their kids and other family members.
Speaker 5 (05:44):
Having been out overseas and some of you have come
with me, you'll see huge closeting and protection of MPs,
ministers and Prime ministers and presidents and as a result,
they are not accessible and not available to the public,
and as I move around it's quite obvious they're not
used to seeing prime ministers or mp As a result,
we want to continue to keep our New Zealand way
of there, which is that actually I do want to
(06:04):
go to the do a Leap of concert on Friday,
and I want to know that I can actually do
that as a private citizen, but also engage with people
along the way who are always pretty generous with me
and pretty good to me. You know, that's important. I
think to be able to have the availability and accessibility
that we have with our politicians, which is unique, I
just put it to you compared to what I see
in other countries. Equally, we do have some really serious
threats and I don't talk about in the impersonal That's
(06:26):
a position I've had from the beginning, and we're trying
to find that balance always of making sure we're protected
but equally we're accessible. And I think you know that's incumbent.
So when we see an event like we saw at
the Eukland airports, you know it's utterly unacceptable and obviously
it's now the full police.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Well just recently, Cabinet Minister Shane Jones's wife Dot was
allegedly grabbed by a man at Altland Airport who had
shouted angry slurs at Jones. She spoke to The Herald
to highlight the risk MP's face, but also as a
warning to other MP's spouses and families. So that's a
real concern here, isn't it When it branches out to
(07:03):
family members and those surrounding the MPs.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Exactly, and it can really affect how people live their
lives as well. So our participants talked about this harassment,
changing what they did, where they went, how they got there,
and even how safe it felt in their own home.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Has there been a shift from I guess i'll call
it online world versus it being taken into the real world.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
I think so. So there's been a lot written about
the online disinhibition effect, so you know that refers to
the keyboard warriors who communicate in much more aggressive ways
online than they would in person. But now we do
seem to be getting a bit of what I would
call the online amplification effect. And this is when people's
(07:49):
views get reinforced and encouraged in online forums and then
spills over to the way that they behave in real life.
So MP's talked about a greater chance that angry people
would come up and accost them at the supermarket, in
the street, or even at the airport at seven thirty
in the morning. Is in the case of Shane Jones
(08:10):
and his wife.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
And some MPs I believe mentioned that they have actually
been assaulted.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Yes, it's not just how much you're hurt at the time,
but the fear that you feel that you could be
seriously hurt or even kurled. And so MPs did talk
about being scared, being afraid from their own safety, the
safety of others, and also experiencing post traumatic symptoms in
relation to some of these events.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
A lot of this has come from social media, and
that's what Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown and Rotarua Mayor Tanya
tap Cell have experienced as well. Does social media just
make it easier to casually tell a politician you want
them to die?
Speaker 4 (09:00):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (09:00):
I think so, and that anonymity behind that as well
makes it easier for people to say things that they
may not actually mean.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
We know when Jasindra Adun resigned, while she didn't explicitly
say it was because of the vitriol she faced. Chris
Hopkins came in saying he would protect his family from
what he called abhorrent abuse that his predecessor received in office.
Threats against her ramped up by the time she left.
The bee Hive data showed targets against her are tripled
(09:30):
over three years, with at least eight threats entered into
the legal system, including a man who vowed to shoot
her for treason. Was she protected enough and has anything
changed since then?
Speaker 3 (09:42):
One thing that our participants mentioned is that when Jasinda
Adern resigned that the threats against them and the vitriol
targeted at them reduced. And this was a comment that
many said made that it was that when women rose
(10:03):
to a certain level of power that seemed to have
negative consequences on other women. So they also talked about
women losing certain portfolios because their gender became too much
of a distraction.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
And of course there's also that larger conversation at play
here as well. Female MPs are faced with gender based harassment,
then it challenges representation in politics as well.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Hey, yeah, that's what we describe as a threat to democracy.
So that based on this, people especially women, maybe less
likely to go into politics. They might be less able
to engage in the political work, so not feeling safe
to go out campaigning or be you know, a public
figure available to their constituents. And it could also exacerbate
(10:46):
stress and burnout, leading to women prematurely leaving parliament as well.
So it's a problem not just for the MPs that
are facing that, but for democracy. And this is something
that has also been seen in overseas jurisdiction as well.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, I was about to say, I see you've referred
to the UK politician Joe Cox.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
She was murdered in twenty sixteen by white supremacist in
a politically motivated attack.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
What was recommended after that.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Yes, So the Joe Cox Foundation set up a number
of recommendations after that, which I think that we can
learn from as well. So often when these threats come in,
they're responded to on an individual basis, with the onus
on the person who's threatened the NP to take legal
action against the perpetrator, which is quite a burden for
(11:34):
them to carry. The Joe Cox Foundation talked about setting
up a central body that would monitor and coordinated response
to abuse, and also about developing guidelines on abuse for
both parliamentarians but also for the police and how they
responded not just to the actual violence that was perpetrated,
(11:55):
but to the risk of harm and the psychological consequences
that that had.
Speaker 6 (12:01):
There's no question unfortunately women in leadership positions, women in politics,
but women and other leadership positions are the subject of
far more abuse and vitriol than men doing comparable jobs are.
And I think we do have a responsibility as men
to step up and to condemn that and to speak
out against it. Now, I think there are many men
who feel a bit uncomfortable about that, and it's not
(12:22):
because they want to endorse the sentiment, but because they
don't want to be seen to be undermining the women
who are the subject of it. But I think we
do need to have honest conversations about it. It is
happening and it's not okay and it's not fair.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
What should be done in New Zealand to prevent something
like that from happening? I mean, if nothing is done
and the abuse just keeps getting worse and worse, do
we run the risk of having a Joe Cock situation
in New Zealand.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
It's a small risk, but it is a risk. Some
of the things that we would recommend is more orientation
and cyber safety training for politicians at induction, increased resources
for them for home and office security, support for the staff.
So many women commented that their electorate staff were those
(13:16):
who were in the frontline of the abuse. They're often
at the coal face, so support for them and for
family members of politicians as well. And measures around enhance
social media screening and filtering of harmful content, and also
possibly legislation change and a willingness to prosecute people who
behave in harmful ways online.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
When conducting this research and with the skills and knowledge
that you have, Susannah, does it shock you the comments
you see and the stories you're told by these MPs.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I'm a forensic psychiatrist, so that is a high risk.
We're seen as a high risk profession in terms of
coming in for abuse. I expected from my previous research
that in Peace would be subjected to nasty stuff, but yes,
I was shocked by the relentless and pervasive nature on
(14:10):
it and also the effects that it was having on
many in peace families as well.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Thanks for joining us, Susannah, You're welcome. That's it for this.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
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 Ethan Sills
and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you
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