White-coated predators still hold power

Immigrant women need to know they can speak out and do us all a favour

I KNOW I should have watched the Louise Nicholas dramatisation in its entirety but I couldn’t. Too grim. Sorry, Louise Nicholas, Phil Kitchin, and all who made the programme, because hopefully it galvanised many into changing their attitudes.

Some say nothing has changed in terms of attitudes to rape – women are still told not to walk alone at night, to wear running shoes for quick getaways, and nonprovocative clothing. However, as I’ve written before on this page, we don’t tell wealthy men to stop wearing flash suits in case they get mugged.

But sexual assaults on women come in many forms, and some are impossible to run from. I was reminded of this, curiously, when

Why didn’t I say anything. I didn’t have the guts.

reading another major story this week by top journalist Phil Kitchin – the confirmation that Bill Sutch was a spy. What’s the connection, you wonder? Sutch’s defence counsel at his trial was the late Mike Bungay, a barrister with the ability to go to the heart of a case, much to the benefit of his clients. But in retrospect, was it justice?

I recall, as will others of my generation, the case in 1976 against the late Erich Geiringer when the well-known doctor was charged with raping a patient. People were aghast; Geiringer crusaded for the rights of women – how could he be a predator? He openly advocated for abortion law reform, took on Spuc (Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child) when they made women feel like trollops, and was so outspoken he was banned from membership of the then-named New Zealand branch of the British Medical Association. This was just a setup by the conservative establishment to get Geiringer, and Bungay got him acquitted. It was the female patient’s word against the good doctor’s.

But was it? In the early 70s Geiringer was widely known as the only prescriber of the contraceptive pill and we students flocked to him. But I still remember slinking from his surgery, cheeks burning, hot with shame, wondering if what he’d done was right. Did doctors need 18-year-old girls to be naked from the waist down just to prescribe contraceptives?

I didn’t tell anyone for 30 years when, on a media junket with former colleagues from the same journalism course, we compared stories and found he’d behaved similarly with them.

If I was as brave as Louise Nicholas all those years ago, maybe Bungay wouldn’t have been so clever. Maybe I could have helped the plaintiff. Why didn’t I say anything? I didn’t have the guts. In those days just being on the pill meant, in the public’s eyes, an unmarried woman was promiscuous – a loaded word to this day not used in association with men, and still used by Conservative leader Colin Craig to describe New Zealand women. Furthermore, Geiringer was the darling of the Wellington social scene; I knew I wouldn’t be believed, just as the poor plaintiff wasn’t deemed credible.

At the time a protest poster was published: ‘‘Male-practice triumphs again – women are to blame for promiscuity and being hysterical.’’

Today I’m an older, experienced woman with confidence to tell police immediately. But I’m not so sure women in, say, New Zealand immigrant communities feel safe. When religion and culture forbid contraception, women fall prey to unprofessional doctors who suspect their patients are left with two bad choices – squeeze your eyes tightly shut and pretend this horror is not happening, or eschew contraception and hope like hell you won’t get pregnant.

These women need support to know being treated like this is criminal; they can speak out, and they’d be doing other women a favour.