Shockwaves of a rape claim
In a North Island city, a teacher tells police she was raped in a classroom. Another teacher is charged. The community is divided – and that’s just the beginning, writes Michelle Duff.
She can’t look at herself naked in the mirror any more. When she catches a glimpse, there’s something surreal about the reflection; like it’s her body, only not quite.
When you have posttraumatic stress disorder, you constantly relive events you’d do anything to forget. For Sarah, whose real name we can’t legally publish, a flash of her own skin can be enough to trigger the night she says another teacher at a leading North Island school raped her in a classroom.
The alleged attack happened after hours, while Sarah was finishing off some work. Of course she knew the teacher; they had once been friends. She remembers the desks, their wooden angles jumbled in a corner. When he let her go, she says, she just ran.
Soon after Sarah told police, they came for him at school.
If this seems like overkill, it probably was. The school had a long-standing reputation as a bastion of educational achievement. Police knew having one of its staff arrested wouldn’t be a great look. But they had larger concerns.
On the day Sarah laid her complaint, another woman walked into the same police station and reported her own rape by the same teacher. There were similarities in the women’s accounts. Police believed them, and felt it was imperative to move quickly.
In 2014, the teacher was charged with both rapes. On that day, Sarah finally felt some relief. She’d taken the action society deems the right one, a path taken by about 9 per cent of sexual assault victims: she’d told the police, and her employer.
But her case never went to court. A few months later, police told her they weren’t confident of a conviction – these are notoriously hard to secure for sexual offences, at around 13 per cent of all recorded cases – and would be dropping the charges.
‘‘Psychologically it seemed so surreal to me, I couldn’t even believe what I was being told.
‘‘I said, ‘Where’s my voice in this, what about what I want?’ They said, ‘It’s too much he-said she-said,’ they quoted the low conviction rates, they said, ‘They are going to rip you to shreds in the courtroom’.’’
Police instead pinned their hopes on the case involving the other woman. This went to trial in 2016, but was abandoned by the Crown due to concerns for her mental wellbeing.
A month later, the man returned to his position at the school, where he continues to work. The Ministry of Education knows about this – it stepped in to reprimand the school twice in 2015, after discovering he was still working while awaiting trial. It refused to provide details of these interventions, citing a court order.
Asked to comment, the man has not replied. His lawyer told Stuff that discussing the case breached name suppression. He said documentary evidence showed Sarah’s allegation was ‘‘maliciously based’’, but declined to provide evidence.
Twice in the past six years, the Law Commission has produced reports indicating the criminal justice system is failing victims of rape. The adversarial system pits alleged victim against perpetrator, with a jury having to believe not only that consent objectively didn’t occur, but that the accused knew it wasn’t consensual.
For a defence lawyer, creating doubt is not difficult. What was she wearing? Why didn’t she scream? Did she want it?
But if the legislation isn’t fit for purpose, it’s also slow to change, and a jail term is the sharp end of the stick. Instead, with the rise of the Time’s Up and Me Too movements, there is a growing acknowledgment that employers have their own duty of care to prevent harassment and assault.
‘‘Survivors should absolutely be encouraged to go to the criminal justice system if they want to, but that doesn’t mean no-one else has responsibility for assuring their safety and justice,’’ says Paulette BentonGreig, of Waikato University’s law school.
‘‘Whether someone meets a criminal criteria for conviction is not the only way to validate what has happened. Employers can provide a cultural environment in which safety and autonomy and respect for others is paramount.’’
Even the most toxic of cultures can be shifted. BentonGreig cites changes since Dame Margaret Bazley’s 2007 report into police conduct, sparked by Louise Nicholas’ complaints of sexual assault, and to the Defence Force since 2016’s Operation Respect.
At Defence, along with the creation of a sexual assault response team, there are now two tiers of misconduct reporting. The first allows victims to remain anonymous while receiving support, and the second can initiate a full investigation. This can make a big difference for some, who want acknowledgement without having to face their assailant.
‘‘Private workplaces are still woefully behind on this stuff,’’ Benton-Greig says. ‘‘It can’t just be a case of ‘Oh the police didn’t press charges, we’ll just act like it didn’t happen.’ How is this not a health and safety issue? It’s a pretty unhealthy workplace if your employers or colleagues can sexually assault or rape you and not be held to account for it.’’
After the alleged rape, Sarah tried to go back to work. But the reception was frosty. Her school responsibilities had been delegated to others, and staff meetings held without her knowledge. More than once, she says, she arrived at school to find the alleged rapist had parked in her designated car park.
‘‘The men on the staff wouldn’t speak to me, I was completely isolated,’’ she says. ‘‘There was a handful of people who were really lovely and said, ‘Thank God you’re back, keep your head up’.
‘‘When I’d try and go about my business and have meetings with male staff members I’d get emails back saying, ‘Sorry, we’re not allowed to meet with you.’ I began to feel like a leper, they were treating me like the kind of lunatic that, at the drop of a hat, would throw an allegation around.’’
Sarah lodged a personal grievance against the school. She reached a settlement in 2015, and resigned.
A friend said the toll on her was horrendous. ‘‘I just remember her being so traumatised. The school was not objective, and her only agenda was the safety of others.’’
Sarah’s life began to unravel.
‘‘The men on the staff wouldn’t speak to me, I was completely isolated ... I began to feel like a leper.’’
Here’s an interesting thing about trauma. When something happens to us we find upsetting – say, we are almost hit by a car on the way to work – we often process this by telling others, and gaining their empathy.
So by the time the fourth workmate has expressed sympathy and horror at our near-death tale, we are probably starting to feel OK about it. Other people can pick up the threads of our story, tying them back together for us.
But, says Auckland Sexual Abuse HELP executive director and clinical psychologist Kathryn McPhillips, this doesn’t always happen for victims of sexual violence. Entrenched cultural understandings of what rape is, and why it happens, mean that if they share their story, they are less likely to get a friendly audience.
Instead, they might face questions about what they were wearing, their relationship with the assailant, why they didn’t follow the right ‘‘script’’ – to say no loudly, and scream and fight, for example – how drunk they are, why they didn’t report it right away.
This is why many rape victims never tell anyone, let alone the authorities. They internalise it as bad sex, maybe. Their own fault.
Sarah’s alleged rapist was part of a close-knit group of teachers at the school, including the headmaster. They had all been there longer than she had. They drank at each other’s houses, knew each other’s wives.
When Sarah told the school authorities her story, it began to spool out of her control. They didn’t say they supported the alleged rapist in so many words.
Around the time police laid charges, Sarah went on stress leave. The accused was bailed and, officially, suspended. Yet he continued to visit the school and was invited back to work by the headmaster, who sent a letter to all staff telling them to ‘‘be supportive of this process’’.
A staff member, who Sarah initially thought was an ally, rang her at home. After the third call, it dawned on her that the woman wasn’t a friend; she was encouraging her to drop the charges.
Another staff member, who has since left, said it was awful. ‘‘The headmaster was so clearly in his favour, and he brought him to work in the school staffroom even though he was up on charges of sexual assault. We all had to tolerate his presence
. . . and it was all ‘Good on ya, mate’ and that kind of stuff.’’
The actions of the school, which Sarah says never held an investigation into the man’s alleged behaviour, added to her sense of injustice.
‘‘I was never given any opportunity to explain what had happened,’’ she says. ‘‘At the time I thought, ‘Fair enough, it is a police matter, maybe they’ve had advice around that.’ But also, knowing the context and the culture, I worried if this would ever be looked at by the school.
‘‘It made me think, ‘Is this going to be made to go away, is it going to be buried?’ It seems at the end of the day it was.’’
The school did not reply to questions about whether it had done enough to support Sarah, whether any internal disciplinary actions had taken place, or whether it held any safety concerns for current staff or students.
Ministry deputy secretary for sector support Katrina Casey said each school and board of trustees was responsible for setting its own policy, and providing a safe physical and emotional environment for staff and students. Certain standards had to be met under education and health and safety legislation.
Last month, New Zealand reported its progress on gender equality to the United Nations women’s rights committee. When it comes to workplace safety, we’re not doing great; in 2017, there were 123 complaints of sexual harassment received by the Human Rights Commission alone (the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment also takes complaints, but has only just begun counting them). This is a 43 per cent increase over 10 years.
The UN admonished the government and recommended it make sexual harassment policies mandatory for all workplaces, with clear processes to ensure complaints were investigated and perpetrators penalised.
Sarah now works in another industry, in a different town. She can’t face another classroom. Her relationship with her husband is solid – he’s been a strong support – but personally, she still struggles.
‘‘You trust nobody, even people you thought you could trust. You see the darkest side of humanity, and it’s so vile you couldn’t script it. You lose all faith in yourself.’’
But humans are resilient. Society can change. By telling this story, Sarah hopes she’s helping to weave a new tapestry.
And that one day, she’ll look in the mirror and see only herself.