New Zealand currently has no laws that specifically address stalking, meaning victims must use other legal provisions to try and protect themselves.
But after much campaigning, including an open letter to Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith and a petition signed by more than 20,000 people earlier this year, the Government has promised to fill that legislative gap.
1News’ Opinion and Explainers Editor Anna Murray spoke to University of Auckland associate professor of law Carrie Leonetti about how victims of stalking are treated now and why New Zealand needs a better legal framework for tackling a crime many people will experience in their lifetime.
What avenues do New Zealanders currently have available to them if they are being stalked by someone?
We don’t have a standalone stalking offence in New Zealand.
We have a lot of different statutory provisions that cover pieces of the behaviour that make up some, but not all stalking.
There are crimes in the Crimes Act like extortion, assault, threats. Then there’s the Trespass Act, so there’s trespassing. The things that are closest to a stalking offence in New Zealand right now are the criminal provisions of the Harassment Act.
Generally, people can go to court and get a restraining order for the narrower definition of criminal harassment.
They could also file a police complaint, but one of the things we know is the police just don’t tend to recognise stalking because people don’t usually walk into a police station to say, ‘I’m being stalked’.
They’ll walk in and say, ‘this person is showing up, this person is having this unwanted contact with me, this person is making me afraid’ and police often just fail to recognise that that is stalking or to recognise how dangerous it is. Stalking is actually a really high-risk behaviour for things like lethality.
So, the first issue is we don’t have this named in the Crimes Act. It doesn’t have a name and therefore doesn’t have a corresponding code for the police to use in incident reports.
Police are not currently trained on stalking because it doesn’t exist as a [standalone] crime.
Clinical psychologist Alan Underwood told Breakfast 20% of women will be victims of stalking, and 10% of men. (Source: Breakfast)
The other issue is the Harassment Act was enacted in 1997, so its definition of harassment is pretty outdated compared to a lot of the stalking we see now. All the digital forms of surveillance, of stalking, of intimidation were not contemplated by the Harassment Act.
The Harassment Act also requires that the [perpetrator] intends to harass the person they’re harassing. That leaves out a lot of even some of the most dangerous stalkers because a lot of stalkers think that the victim wants to be with them.
[Our current legal provisions] also only apply to fear of death or great bodily harm, and stalking can be really pervasive. It can be harmful in this really pervasive way, even if it doesn’t involve a threat to the person’s life.
There are just a lot of ways the current provisions are inadequate.
The bill, to be introduced by Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence spokesperson Ginny Andersen, would likely include adding a stalking offence with a punishment of imprisonment. (Source: Breakfast)
How does New Zealand currently measure up to other countries when it comes to stalking legislation?
Most English-speaking countries with which we share legal pedigree have stalking offences.
Unfortunately, what you see in a lot of countries is it takes a high-profile murder to then sort of trigger for legislators that they need to have criminal stalking provisions.
[This year’s petition to Parliament about stalking laws referenced the 2022 murder of AUT law student Farzana Yaqubi, who had made multiple police complaints about a stalker before she was killed.]
I think we’re quite behind in that we still don’t have a stalking provision in 2024.
Watchdog condemns official response to AUT law student Farzana Yaqubi’s concerns prior to her murder. (Source: 1News)
What would adding stalking to the Crimes Act do?
The first hope is just that [police] will identify [stalking] — that this will [get police] to think about stalking as a free-standing crime — it will be given a code that goes into an incident report.
It also means there’s accountability for police.
If somebody makes a complaint to the police and they don’t do anything about the stalking, it’s a much clearer … misconduct that then allows us to sort of retrain and address those gaps.
[Putting stalking in the Crimes Act] would be good even just for data collection. We can’t collect data on stalking in New Zealand. We don’t know how common it is, we don’t know what kind of responses you get from the police because it’s never going to show up in a police report because we don’t have that word anywhere in our legislation.
[But] if we criminalise stalking, we need to see training, too — training people to identify it and recognise the harm that it causes. I actually think of stalking as a crime on liberty, often because what victims of stalking will report over and over again is that they change their lifestyles in response to the stalking.
They close their curtains, they don’t go out at night, they don’t go to certain places, they don’t engage in certain activities — they make their lives smaller and smaller to avoid the stalking. So even if it doesn’t escalate to physical violence or murder, it has a profound effect on victims.
So, we need to train our justice system stakeholders to understand that “just” stalking is still a major crime, and it is disproportionately gendered. It is disproportionately committed by men against women; it’s another way that women have to go through life being unsafe.
You signed the open letter to the Justice Minister about stalking legislation this year — what motivated you to do that?
We have had several murders of women [who were stalked] over the last few years … some of whom went to the police, some of whom went to the Family Court, some of whom didn’t seek help at all, but I think all of whom had moments where effective intervention might have saved their lives.
If you look at a lot of the family violence deaths, there are clear elements of stalking that preceded the murder.
That’s the key message — there are red flags and there are opportunities to intervene. We should really focus on preventing these family violence or intimate partner murders. We’d much rather pick it up when it’s stalking than pick it up when it’s murder.
Cross-party support for stalking legislation
Introducing a law that makes stalking a crime is one of those rare issues that has support across the political divide.
Labour MP Ginny Andersen lodged a member’s bill in May to create a new offence for stalking. Her bill proposes a jail term of up to five years.
The Government said it would introduce legislation to address stalking in its final quarterly action plan of the year.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith told 1News yesterday details on that law would be released “very soon”.
“We are committed to introducing legislation before the end of the year that will make stalking illegal,” he said.
