Kim McGregor

Speaking up for victims

As a child Kim McGregor lived on the edge of homelessness. At one point her family were relegated to a rudimentary tin shed on the edge of the Australian desert after they were tossed out of their council house. Her mother’s violent boyfriend was responsible for that eviction.

McGregor never saw herself as a victim. That was just life. ‘‘Kids are resilient,’’ she says.

But she was a victim – of abuse from her stepfather, of a childhood peppered with violence and uncertainty; of a system that ignored her pleas for help.

Her background has instilled in her a vital attribute for her job as chief victims adviser to the government – empathy.

If you run out of that in this role, she says, you’re really in trouble.

McGregor has spent 30 years helping victims, through her private therapy practice or as an advocate for a plethora of not-for-profits, including Auckland Sexual Abuse Help or Rape Prevention.

Now into her third two-year term as chief victims adviser, she never thought she’d get the job in the first place. ‘‘I thought I’d been too much of a pain in the side of government for the past 30 years. I’d been constantly asking for more money and complaining, writing open letters to prime ministers . . . I thought it would be too much of a risk for them to appoint me.

‘‘I think I have imposter syndrome.’’ Since her appointment in 2015, she has provided independent advice on how to improve the criminal justice system for victims.

That advice was laid bare in her report last September of a survey of victims that revealed the crisis of confidence in the system.

The numbers revealed in Te Tangi o te Manawanui: Recommendations for Reform were criminal: 83 per cent felt unsafe in the system; 77 per cent said their views and concerns were not listened to; fewer than a quarter of offences were reported to the police. Only 20 per cent of family violence and 10 per cent of sexual offences were reported. Based on the fact that so few are reporting crimes against them, this also meant huge numbers of perpetrators are able to continue offending.

When first appointed to the adviser role McGregor asked her officials just how many victims there were in the system at any one time. What were their issues?

They didn’t know. They didn’t know what data was collected on victims either.

There have been few reports of this nature, asking victim survivors about their experiences in the criminal justice system, she says.

‘‘It’s what I’d been hearing anecdotally but this gave me the evidence – the numbers – I needed to give to the minister to prove that there are very real issues in the criminal justice system that need to be addressed.’’

And with the results of that survey, she and her small team have been able to provide recommendations to the Government on how best to improve the system from a victim’s perspective.

The recommendations include creating a wraparound service for victims going through their court case, establishing a central point of contact where the victim is navigated through the system, training for judges, lawyers, police, and an alternative process outside the court system for the almost 80 per cent of people who don’t report crimes against them.

McGregor, 62, was born in the industrial northeast of England, in Middlesbrough. She lived in a council house and her parents divorced before she was 2.

Her mother had had a dreadful childhood. Regularly beaten by her father, she often sought refuge in her dog’s kennel. It was a brutal upbringing.

When McGregor was 5, she and her mother emigrated as £10 Poms to Australia, where her maternal grandmother lived. They lived in Whyalla, a steelworks town on the edge of a desert in South Australia.

Her mother’s boyfriend was violent. One night, in a jealous rage, he attacked a colleague of her mother who had dropped her home. McGregor’s enduring memory is of the colleague spitting out his bloodied teeth.

The incident led to their being thrown out of their council house. Their next home was a corrugated iron shed with a concrete floor. The outside loo was riddled with redback spiders and frill-neck lizards.

Then her mother met another man who would become her stepfather. Unbeknown to them he had abused his own two daughters.

When she was 10 they moved to New Zealand, settling in the Lower Hutt suburb of Petone. Her stepfather began sexually abusing her a year later.

At 15 she took an overdose, winding up in a psychiatric ward in Wellington Hospital for a spell. She knew she needed to get out of the family home so left school to work as a clerk at the Department of Social Welfare. She wanted to be a social worker.

‘‘There was nobody in my sphere who had studied at university. My mother and stepfather had left school at 13. The only books in our house were Reader’s Digest. I was never encouraged to study. The great hope for me was for me to become an office worker, a secretary.’’

At 16 her mother and stepfather announced they were moving to England. McGregor was expected to go with them but she saw this as her way out of the abuse. ‘‘I thought that at 16 I didn’t have to go but I wasn’t sure so I engaged a lawyer. He told me I was very ungrateful not to go with them but confirmed I didn’t have to so I paid him the $100 and left.’’

She left home and went flatting in Island Bay, in Wellington. She was married at 17, going on to have two children – a son, whom she lost at birth, and a daughter.

At 21 she enrolled at Victoria University, where she studied in her lunch hours. Her mind was itching to learn. She would go on to get many letters behind her name: Masters in Education, PhD.

She became something of an ‘‘accidental advocate’’ for victims of sexual abuse, she says. It was the late 1980s and Auckland Sexual Abuse Help (ASAH), where she volunteered, had only two weeks’ worth of wages in the bank and was at risk of closure.

‘‘We got a letter from government at Christmas time saying our funding was going to be cut. We were going to have to close at the busiest time of the year so I started ringing Parliament. There weren’t many people around at that time of the year but it just so happened that an MP picked up the phone. I explained our problem to this female MP. That woman happened to be Helen Clark.

‘‘She fixed it for us by rerouting the money through some other department.

‘‘The point is that I discovered through this that if you want something done you just have to go straight to the top.’’

McGregor, who was awarded a QSO in 2014 for services to the prevention of sexual violence, has penned many self-help books for survivors of sexual abuse.

Through her own therapy and training company, Tiaki Consultants, she and her business partner researched sexual harassment within the air force in 2015.

They discovered a very big problem with sexual harassment and sexual violence going back decades. ‘‘The process within the military was problematic because if a complainant of sexual violence reported to the commanding officer in the hierarchy often that commanding officer was potentially playing golf with the person who had harmed the complainant.

‘‘The Defence Force was losing really good female personnel. Some of the interviewees talked about their harassment being like death by a thousand cuts – ongoing sexism and undermining of their roles in the air force. It was very sobering.’’

The army and navy, realising that if the air force had a problem they probably did too, launched Operation RESPECT in 2016, an action plan to address harmful and inappropriate sexual behaviour in the NZDF.

Empathy remains the key to her work. ‘‘If you’ve not got any empathy that’s the day you need to move out of this work.

‘‘I think I’m a bit of a Pollyanna. I always think we can make a change and I take any opportunity I can find to make things better.

‘‘I’ve dealt with people who have been very suicidal. I’ve always worked in the positive because they are there in front of me. They are alive and as long as they’re alive, there’s hope.’’

‘‘I take any opportunity I can find to make things better.’’