News

The head of the New Zealand Catholic church has asked the Vatican for permission to launch an investigation into the handling of complaints about a priest who groomed a teenage girl. Sateki Raass resigned from the priesthood after he was convicted in 2019 of indecent communication with a girl under 16 and ordered to serve 100…

ACC is spending nearly 45 million dollars on a bid to prevent sexual violence, including $11.7 million for kaupapa Māori approaches. Over the next four years it aimed to tackle the underlying causes of sexual violence and to do work on changing attitudes and behaviours. The agency would work on the problem alongside other government…

A priest convicted of grooming a teenage girl to send him nude photos was the subject of a previous complaint that was covered up by the Tongan Catholic Church. The victim’s aunt and an abuse survivors’ group said it showed the church should have prevented Sosefo Sateki Raass’ offending. The Tongan church gave Raass a…

Thousands of child exploitation images, including images of children as young as two being raped and tortured, were found on a laptop computer discarded at an apartment rubbish dump. The computer was found by a member of the public at a central Christchurch address, who briefly checked it and saw what appeared to be images…

A web-crawling software will be used in New Zealand with the aim of detecting and removing child sex abuse material. The New Zealand Classification Office has joined a one-year pilot in collaboration with Canada’s Project Arachnid, which searches for and identifies child sex abuse material online. Chief Censor David Shanks said the worldwide scope of the Canadian…

Oranga Tamariki was warned about restraints at a Christchurch care and protection residence months before it was finally closed. The concerns are highlighted in a December 2020 report by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner into Te Oranga Care and Protection Residence. It said children and young people were still being hurt during restraints. A…

WARNING: This article references indecent assault and suicide. A Wellington man says his life has been destroyed by an indecent assault and what he sees as significant failings by the justice system. Mackenzie Skinner speaks to the Herald about the reality of being a male abuse survivor in Aotearoa. Mackenzie Skinner has lost friends, family,…

Southern survivors of sexual abuse are being turned away for important support at an alarming rate, leaving them devastated and re-traumatised, an advocate claims. The Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) has come under fire for disestablishing its Wellington-based sensitive claims unit, which dealt with physical or mental injuries following criminal acts, including sexual violence, in favour…

Sheltered By Grace is a non-government funded Charity which is an accredited, level 3 Support Accommodation service based in South East Queensland that houses Single Men over the age of 25 escaping Domestic Violence. A brochure is available at oneinthree.com.au This is the first domestic violence shelter for men currently operating in Australia that we…

Advocates now calling for the Crown to do more to redress this collective loss to hapū from our “stolen generation”. For the last two weeks the public has heard testimony from survivors, witnesses and former staff who were at the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent unit in the 1970s – almost half of whom were Māori.…

The NSW inquiry into coercive control in domestic relationships published its report this week. The report contains the following sickeningly sexist (and factually incorrect) gendered analysis of coercive control. Apparently men and lesbian women can control their partners but heterosexual women are unable to do so except in (presumably) rare cases. The report also cited testimony from…

The Boy Scouts of America have reached a US$850 million (NZ$1.2 billion) agreement with attorneys representing some 60,000 victims of child sex abuse in what could prove to be a pivotal moment in the organisation’s bankruptcy case. The agreement filed in court by BSA attorneys yesterday would mark one of the largest sums in US…