Laws around stalking in NZ are completely non-existent, despite the fact that much of the rest of the world have strict laws around it, and the fact that there are cases of stalking in NZ that have escalated to murder. So, what is going on?
It’s the Netflix sensation of 2024 – and by now you have surely watched or at least heard of the black comedy/thriller series, Baby Reindeer. The – often disturbing and confronting – series stars Richard Gadd, and is an adaptation of his autobiographical stage show (yes, that’s right, this series is based on events that really did happen).
At the heart of it is the storyline of how Donny (the stage name Richard takes) was stalked by a woman who he met at the bar he worked in, after he offered her a cup of tea when she seemed to be upset. From that meeting she returned to his workplace every single day, bombarding him with thousands and thousands of emails and turning up wherever he went. The story also goes even darker, revealing how Donny was groomed, drugged and sexually abused years earlier.
For Donny (and at one point, his family members who become the target of his stalker) one of the most disheartening moments of the ordeal occurs when he finds there’s actually little the police in Scotland (where it is all set) can do to help. Although, when the case becomes quite serious due to the female stalker’s background, he does receive intervention.
But, for many who have been stalked in New Zealand – and can understand exactly how frightening, overwhelming and disturbing it can be – they know this process is even more frustrating and difficult in this country.
Because while stalking is a crime in Scotland (and many other countries including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Denmark – who were the first to recognise it as a crime in 1933 – Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Malta), it is still not considered one under the current laws in New Zealand.
Wait, what!?
If this fact comes as a shock, you’re not alone. We certainly were – as well as the many Capsule readers we polled on the topic last week: 60% of you said you were unaware that stalking is still not considered a crime in NZ. That’s despite 97% of you (us included!!) thinking it should definitely be a crime (3% of you said you were unsure – we had a double check of this, and all of the people who replied, ‘I don’t know’ also replied ‘no’ to the question ‘have you ever been stalked?’).
“When I went to the police,” says one Capsule reader, Amber, “they listened to me, but there was jack-all they could do. I’d changed my phone number twice – a massive hassle – but my call log was still full of phone calls. They were mostly from an unknown number. It was him though. It felt like he was everywhere. I stopped going for runs or so many other things because I was afraid.”
Amber says her ex started behaving very strangely and obsessively after they broke up – she blocked his number and blocked him on social media, which only seemed to increase his desire to make contact with her.
“He sent me emails to my work address from different email addresses every single day. None of them were threatening, but just describing what he’d seen me doing, what he’d been doing. Asking me questions, mainly asking about my love life and speculating about it. It was horrible. The police said they couldn’t do anything, because it’s not a crime to email someone and ask them if they enjoyed their blueberry muffin that morning.”
Another reader, Cassie, says she’s only just started describing what she went through as stalking. “I had an ex who couldn’t let it go,” she says. “It was funny, well, not funny, but weird that he seemed to be pretty fine with it when we broke up in person. We hadn’t gone on that many dates, but it had been about two months and I wasn’t feeling it so I let him know. He kind of shrugged it off and said he felt the same.”
But then her ex started just “bumping into her” places – like near the gym she went to, or outside her work. “We had a couple of casual conversations when we’d bump into each other and I felt very uneasy how much it seemed to happen,” she says. “He also knew a lot of information about me that I did not tell him. I’d deleted him from Facebook but he kept trying to message me, and on Instagram. He started messaging my friends about me. My father was in hospital care in a retirement village, and when I went to visit him one day, my ex was in the corridor outside. I screamed it scared me so much. He’d always say ‘what a coincidence!’ and joke about it, but it was happening like once a week. He started saying it must be fate and kept asking if we should give it another shot. I’d walk away, never talking to him but he’d follow me to my car.”
When Cassie was with a male friend on one of the occasions they “bumped into each other” he intervened and told him to stay away. It managed to do the trick. “At the time it was scary,” she says. “I felt anxious all the time, wondering what he would do next or thinking someone was watching me. But no one called it stalking. It was just this ‘obsessed’ guy. It’s only recently that I started calling it stalking. That’s what it was, but at the time I… I dunno, people didn’t use that word? I didn’t know if it was what it really was?”
Cassie’s certainly not alone in feeling that way. Out of the Capsule readers we surveyed, 12% said they’d been stalked, while a further 24% instead ticked ‘Kind of?! I’m not sure if it was technically or not’.
“I had an ex who turned psycho when we broke up,” says another reader Claire. “He went through my Facebook – going back through 10 years of posts and photos and commented on every single one. He’d sit outside my house and say he was waiting for a friend who lived on the same street, but ask whose car it was that was in my driveway. He sent me text messages every week, as though we hadn’t broken up? It lasted three months. I don’t know whether that was technically stalking though.”
In the US – where stalking is a crime (in fact, in nearly one half of the states it is even classified as a felony) – they have a clear definition of what stalking looks like. There, stalking is defined as “a course of conduct directed at a specific person that involves repeated (two or more occasions) visual or physical proximity, nonconsensual communication, or verbal, written or implied threats, or a combination thereof, that would cause a reasonable person fear.
And, from the stats available in the US, stalking continues to be on the rise, with now nearly 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men experiencing stalking victimisation at some point in their lifetime. And, the impact on those who have been or are being stalked is far reaching, with victims suffering from much higher rates of depression, anxiety, insomnia, and social dysfunction than people in the general population. The crime of stalking itself is often seen to have similarities to domestic violence, in that it is a ‘crime of power and control’.
This is one area in which the States (and much of the world) really put NZ to shame, in that we do not have any stalking laws.
And it’s a stance that is leaving New Zealanders – mostly women – in serious danger. In December 2022 an Auckland law student, Farzana Yaqubi, was killed by a man who had previously been stalking her. Just two weeks before her death she had told police she was in ‘extreme fear’ and that she was worried that the stalking would “result in life-threatening results”.
It’s after this final straw that Labour’s police spokesperson Ginny Anderson has drafted a bill that would add stalking to the Crimes Act.
“In the case of Farzana Yaqubi, the Independent Police Conduct Authority found more should have been done to follow lines of enquiry in her case,” says Ginny. “There’s a chance her death could have been prevented. Stalking should be a crime. It can make a victim feel extremely unsafe and insecure, and in some cases result in serious assault, or even death. The murder of Farzana Yaqubi is a public case that could have been prevented, but there are plenty of other cases that go unreported. This bill will help ensure the safety and sanity of people in our community, and ensure police are treating stalking just like any other crime.”
The Auckland Coalition for the Safety of Women and Children have been calling for a reform of our laws for a very long time, and say the matter is now urgent.
“As multiple stories show, our lack of fit-for-purpose stalking laws is dangerous and outdated, leaving targeted women without protection and poisoning our public life,” says Coalition chair Leonie Morris. “We’ve waited too long for successive governments to fix this horrific reality.”
Leonie says more education is required on the topic, with some people seeing one action of stalking in isolation as trivial – without seeing that it is part of a pattern of repeated behaviour that is designed to control the victim and assert power through fear. She says this ignorance leads to victim blaming and minimising of stalking.
“Our current piecemeal laws do not hold stalkers accountable or make victims safe,” she says. “As the current discussion about New Zealand’s misogynistic political arena shows, we need to do better to uphold human rights, to ensure our country lives up to our expectations. A robust, coherent stalking law would go a long way to ensure all New Zealanders, especially women, are empowered to make life choices without fear.”
So what can we do? The Coalition has written an open letter to the Minister of Justice, Paul Goldsmith, with a call to make stalking a crime in NZ. It is accompanied by a petition, which you can sign here.
Have you been stalked? If you’d like to share your story, thoughts or opinions on this topic, please email alice@capsulenz.com – we’ll be bringing you more stories on stalking in the coming weeks and would love to include your voice in them.