Speaker 1: The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.
Speaker 1: Detective sy a side of life the average person is
Speaker 1: never exposed her. I spent thirty four years as a cop.
Speaker 1: For twenty five of those years, I was catching killers.
Speaker 1: That's what I did for a living. I was a
Speaker 1: homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead,
Speaker 1: I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated.
Speaker 1: The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories
Speaker 1: from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
Speaker 1: and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some
Speaker 1: of the content and language might be confronting. That's because
Speaker 1: no one who comes in the contact with crime is
Speaker 1: left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into
Speaker 1: this world. Welcome to another episode of I Catch Killers.
Speaker 1: Today's guest, Nina Fanell, is a passionate advocate for sexual
Speaker 1: assault awareness, prevention, and survivor's rights. Now we all know
Speaker 1: this is a difficult subject to talk about, but I
Speaker 1: think discussion needs to be had. Nina has become a
Speaker 1: prominent voice across the country, starting conversations about consent and
Speaker 1: sexual violence. Through her advocacy, she aims to educate the public,
Speaker 1: challenge harmful societal norms, and push for systemic changes that
Speaker 1: support survivors and hold perpetrators accountable. It's important work that
Speaker 1: Nina does and I'm looking forward to sitting down with
Speaker 1: her today and having a chat, finding out who she is,
Speaker 1: and we're also going to discuss her own experience as
Speaker 1: a survivor of a violent sexual assault, an experience that
Speaker 1: has driven her to make a difference in society. Nina
Speaker 1: is also an award winning journalist and I've got to say,
Speaker 1: a very impressive person. I think today's conversation is going
Speaker 1: to be very informative. So let's get into it. Nina Fan, Now,
Speaker 1: welcome to I Catch Killers. Hello, how are you?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Pretty good.
Speaker 1: Hot day where we're in the luxury of air conditioned studio,
Speaker 1: but it was very hot outside. Your name keeps coming
Speaker 1: up to me with people. Have you spoken to Nina?
Speaker 1: Have you spoken to Nina? So this sit down has
Speaker 1: been a long long time coming. You have a bit
Speaker 1: of a reputation, do I? And now is that ever good?
Speaker 3: Or yeah? Well, it's interesting because your name keeps coming
Speaker 3: up to me as well, so I think it's yeah.
Speaker 1: I deny that allegation. Well, we mentioned when before we
Speaker 1: started here, Claire Harvey, and that's a person who was
Speaker 1: mentored me when my early stages in striking into the media.
Speaker 1: And you've worked with Claire as well.
Speaker 3: I have, and Claire she's been phenomenal. She's been a
Speaker 3: really good support as well as editor and mentor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what Claire taught me a lot about the integrity.
Speaker 1: I admired her integrity, about the importance of getting the
Speaker 1: truth out and stories. And she was fearless too.
Speaker 3: And funny. She's actually, she's one of the funniest people I've met.
Speaker 1: I was trying to say she was professional, but she's
Speaker 1: very funny. She's a good lady, good lady allround. Your background,
Speaker 1: first of all your personal life, as in your where
Speaker 1: you grew up.
Speaker 2: Who's Nina? Tell us a little bit about Nina.
Speaker 3: Okay, So I grew up in Sydney, lived here, studied
Speaker 3: here until my twenties, and then pursued a career in journalism.
Speaker 2: And what were you studying at UNI?
Speaker 3: So I studied meta in communications. I'd always wanted to
Speaker 3: be a journalist. At high school, I'd been editor of
Speaker 3: the school newspaper, and you know that was my goal.
Speaker 3: Either that or law, and it was sort of a
Speaker 3: flip of a coin in the end, but I decided
Speaker 3: that I wanted to pursue a career in journalism, so
Speaker 3: off I went studied that, and then I, through a
Speaker 3: series of events, decided that I would specialize in reporting
Speaker 3: on sexual violence. That was an area that I wanted
Speaker 3: to dedicate my time to.
Speaker 1: Okay, it seems like a prerequisite for people that get
Speaker 1: into the media or journalists. They head up the school
Speaker 1: school paper or have some involvement, So it's got to
Speaker 1: be a passion, hasn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, I guess. I guess I've
Speaker 3: always been interested in people and people's stories and where
Speaker 3: they're coming from. This is this is quite unusual for
Speaker 3: me to be on this side, usually in your seat,
Speaker 3: and I'm the one who's asking people about their lives,
Speaker 3: so I'm not I'm not so used to talking about
Speaker 3: my life, but I've always been curious about what drives
Speaker 3: people and what their objectives are and sharing their stories.
Speaker 1: Okay, your professional career and well, I've got a list
Speaker 1: of things here that I don't want to embarrass you.
Speaker 1: But your Walkley Award winning journalists yep, and what was
Speaker 1: that in relation.
Speaker 3: To I've won a couple. So so I did. A
Speaker 3: couple of years ago I started the Let Her Speak campaign,
Speaker 3: which was to reform sexual assault victim gag laws around
Speaker 3: the country. So I'd met a young woman called Grace
Speaker 3: tame Well. Actually at the time, what I was doing
Speaker 3: is I was reporting on sexual assault within universities, and
Speaker 3: I was trying to do fifty two articles in fifty
Speaker 3: two weeks about university campus rape. I had ended up
Speaker 3: teaching in the media department at Sydney University, and because
Speaker 3: I'd gone public as a survivor myself, a number of
Speaker 3: my students had recognized me, and so if they had
Speaker 3: their own stories, they saw me, I guess, as a
Speaker 3: safe person that they could come and disclose to. So
Speaker 3: I was receiving quite a number of disclosures of sexual violence,
Speaker 3: particularly within the residential colleges at Sydney University. And so
Speaker 3: when I became a journalist, I decided that I would
Speaker 3: One of the projects I'd always wanted to do was
Speaker 3: a seer. He's focusing on sexual assault within universities and colleges,
Speaker 3: and so it was in that year that I got
Speaker 3: a tip off about this guy a convicted sex offender
Speaker 3: called Nicholas best who now most Australians would know of
Speaker 3: as the person who had groomed and assaulted Grace Tame.
Speaker 3: And at the time, Nicholas Bester was down at the
Speaker 3: University of Tasmania studying his PhD and living on campus
Speaker 3: in a residential college with in a co educational residential
Speaker 3: college with you know, he was in his sixties and
Speaker 3: he was living alongside eighteen year olds and with shared
Speaker 3: bathroom facilities and so on. It was very creepy. And
Speaker 3: so the students at UTAZ were saying, can you report
Speaker 3: on this guy who's who's who's on our campus and
Speaker 3: who's making a number of students feel very uncomfortable, And
Speaker 3: so I said, yeah, you know, I'd be happy to
Speaker 3: look at the story, but I'd want to know what
Speaker 3: his original victim feel about this, and is she comfortable
Speaker 3: with the story being told in the media and so on,
Speaker 3: And so I tracked her down and at the time,
Speaker 3: Grace was living in la and so at first I
Speaker 3: was just really feeling out whether she'd be comfortable with
Speaker 3: me running this story about Besta living on campus, and
Speaker 3: she then indicated that she would actually like to comment
Speaker 3: and to tell her story as well, and so I thought, great, sure,
Speaker 3: so I ran it past our lawyers at News dot
Speaker 3: com dot au and they said, well, you can run
Speaker 3: the story, but you just can't name the victim survivor.
Speaker 3: And I was quite perplex Why not. She's over eighteen, now,
Speaker 3: she's given consent, there's no defamation issues, you know, all
Speaker 3: the things that we would usually go through and tick off.
Speaker 3: And they, Gina McWilliams, the lawyer, said well, there's this
Speaker 3: thing in TASMANI called Section one nine four K of
Speaker 3: the Evidence Act, which prohibits sexual assault survivors from being
Speaker 3: able to self identify the media unless they go to
Speaker 3: court and seek a court order from a judge. And
Speaker 3: I was absolutely perplexed. I've never heard anything like this
Speaker 3: because most of the reporting that I've done has been
Speaker 3: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, et cetera. So,
Speaker 3: to cut a long story short, we went back to
Speaker 3: Grace and said would she like us to obtain her
Speaker 3: a court order so that she can self identify? And
Speaker 3: she said yes. And the more I sort of began
Speaker 3: to dig in with our lawyers, I realized it was
Speaker 3: costing about ten thousand dollars, and I thought, well, what
Speaker 3: would she do if she didn't have a news organization
Speaker 3: willing to do that work? What would she do if
Speaker 3: she just wanted to write her own Facebook post or
Speaker 3: an autobiography? Would she actually have to wear this cost?
Speaker 3: And the answer was yes. And for me as a
Speaker 3: survivor myself, I'd gone public when I was twenty three
Speaker 3: years old in New South Wales and that had been
Speaker 3: a very cathartic and healing thing for me to be
Speaker 3: able to do. So to realize that there was an
Speaker 3: entire jurisdiction, and it turns out not just one. Both
Speaker 3: the Northern Territory and Tasmania had these laws where no
Speaker 3: sexual assault survivor regardless. It wasn't just child sexual salt survivors,
Speaker 3: it was any survivors. They couldn't tell their story without
Speaker 3: having to go jump through this hope and seeking a
Speaker 3: court order. So I pitched the idea of a campaign
Speaker 3: to my editors at news dot com dot a you
Speaker 3: could let her speak. At first, it was just going
Speaker 3: to be about Grace, and in the end, of course,
Speaker 3: once we got Grace's court order, I then got flooded
Speaker 3: with other survivors who said I didn't realize I'm living
Speaker 3: in Tasmania or I'm living in the Northern Territory and
Speaker 3: I want to tell my story too. So I set
Speaker 3: up a go fund me and raised a couple of
Speaker 3: one hundred thousand dollars and engaged Mark lawyers to progressively
Speaker 3: obtain these court orders. And then what I would do
Speaker 3: is each time we'd get a court order for one
Speaker 3: of the survivors, I would then break their story going
Speaker 3: public and we would then use that as an opportunity
Speaker 3: to once again highlight the punitive impacts of the laws.
Speaker 3: And so I ran that campaign for three years and
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty the various gag laws around Australia were
Speaker 3: all reformed. So that was.
Speaker 2: That was.
Speaker 3: One of the reasons why I got the WALKLEYFF for
Speaker 3: Women's leadership and for public service journalism.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, full credit to you, because if you can
Speaker 1: do something in the media, in journalism that makes a difference,
Speaker 1: makes a difference to people's lives. With that campaign, how
Speaker 1: many people came out that were called up in that
Speaker 1: legislation that they couldn't couldn't speak out.
Speaker 3: So in the end we ended up making twenty two
Speaker 3: applications for court orders. One of the crazy things that
Speaker 3: happened was just after Tasmania had reformed their legislation, I
Speaker 3: got a phone call from another journalist called Scherrell Moody
Speaker 3: to say that Victoria had just introduced a gag law.
Speaker 3: They'd gone backwards. And what was remarkable about that was
Speaker 3: when I was running the campaign in Tasmania and the
Speaker 3: Northern Territory, no one was defending the law. These were
Speaker 3: old laws that were still on the books. They'd been
Speaker 3: introduced at a time when no one had actually conceived
Speaker 3: of something like the Me Too movement. No one had
Speaker 3: preempted that survivors would ever want to be attached to
Speaker 3: their stories, into their names, having their names attached to
Speaker 3: their stories. So the laws had been introduced with the
Speaker 3: idea that they were actually protecting victim survivors from exploitative
Speaker 3: media who might try to harass or pressure people into
Speaker 3: revealing their name exactly. So when we began the campaign
Speaker 3: in Tasmania and the NT, there were no natural defenders
Speaker 3: of the legislation. People pretty quickly realized, yeah, this is
Speaker 3: outdated and it's time for reform. Victoria was a very,
Speaker 3: very different fight because the legislation was liberately introduced in
Speaker 3: early twenty twenty. And the other thing that made it
Speaker 3: very fact is it made that a very different fight.
Speaker 3: Was firstly, Victoria has a very long and proud history
Speaker 3: of victim survivors doing advocacy. If you look at things
Speaker 3: like the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse,
Speaker 3: a lot of that was driven out of Ballarat by
Speaker 3: survivors who waived their right to anonymity. So we already
Speaker 3: had a very vocal group of survivor advocates down in Victoria,
Speaker 3: and then all of a sudden in twenty twenty, the
Speaker 3: Victorian government introduces this legislation that overnight puts these people
Speaker 3: back in the closet and tells them you can't continue
Speaker 3: your advocacy, you can't be named anymore. And some of
Speaker 3: those people had their books out, they had autobiographies, and
Speaker 3: overnight those books were in contempt of court. So it
Speaker 3: was it was extremely different because it wasn't just survivors
Speaker 3: had to fight for their rights. It was survivors who
Speaker 3: had already exercised their to be public overnight was suddenly.
Speaker 2: Gagged and have to justify themselves.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so that was very, very traumatic for them,
Speaker 3: and it also meant that the government when we initially
Speaker 3: launched the campaign and were contacting them about the laws,
Speaker 3: they were very defensive and they dug their heels in
Speaker 3: and it took quite a lot of persuasion for them
Speaker 3: to eventually agree to overturn the laws. And when I
Speaker 3: was going through there was one particular survivor, Jamie Lee
Speaker 3: in Victoria. She her cases. It was a terrible case.
Speaker 3: She was sexually abused by her biological father and so
Speaker 3: was her older stepsister, and her older stepsister reported the
Speaker 3: father to police, and before it got to trial, the
Speaker 3: father murdered the stepsister so to shut her up so
Speaker 3: she couldn't give evidence. So the father then went to
Speaker 3: jail for murder, and as he was approaching the release date,
Speaker 3: Jamie realized he actually he doesn't have any sexual offenses
Speaker 3: convicted because he only went to jail for the murder.
Speaker 3: So Jamie decided, as an adult that she would then
Speaker 3: give evidence so that he would be he would become
Speaker 3: a registered sex offender, which then of course has different
Speaker 3: implications exactly. So Jamie had just gone to court as
Speaker 3: an adult to have her father reconvicted this time as
Speaker 3: a sex offender, and was successful in doing that, and
Speaker 3: her entire goal in doing that was so that she
Speaker 3: could then publicize his name and warn people about who
Speaker 3: he was and what he had really done. And so
Speaker 3: while she was successful in the court case and he
Speaker 3: was convicted of the sex offenses, when the gag law
Speaker 3: was introduced, it meant that Jamie couldn't be named. And
Speaker 3: one of the perverse outcomes of that was neither could
Speaker 3: her father because they share a surname. So all of
Speaker 3: a sudden, her entire purpose of going to court, And
Speaker 3: keep in mind, this was back during code, so it
Speaker 3: was a very different you know, there were not a
Speaker 3: lot of supports, it was a very different climate. So
Speaker 3: Jamie had gone through this horrendous, horrendous series of events,
Speaker 3: and when we went to fight for her right to
Speaker 3: get a court order, we were then told that not
Speaker 3: only would we have to fight for her right to
Speaker 3: name herself, we would also have to apply for a
Speaker 3: court order to name her deceased sister. Because at the
Speaker 3: same time that the government had the Victorian government had
Speaker 3: introduced the legislation gagging living sexual assault victims, they'd also
Speaker 3: introduced legislation that made it a criminal offense for journalists
Speaker 3: to name any deceased sexual assault victims.
Speaker 1: Can I ask what was made evading Victorian government, because
Speaker 1: it seems to be like swimming against the tide. What
Speaker 1: evated them in twenty twenty to reintroduce that legislation.
Speaker 3: We still don't know. And we've been through handside and
Speaker 3: everything at the time, and there wasn't a very clear
Speaker 3: justification for the introduction of that legislation. It was a
Speaker 3: massive cock up basically, and that.
Speaker 1: Call me suspicious, but I'm wondering why that was being
Speaker 1: driven yeah, boor then.
Speaker 3: You know, the only group that was actually being protected
Speaker 3: by that were offenders. But we still don't have a
Speaker 3: clear answer from government. In the end, they did so
Speaker 3: one of the things that happened was because they also
Speaker 3: introduced this gag on deceased victim so overnight it became
Speaker 3: a criminal offense to name Jill mar or Eurydice Dixon
Speaker 3: or any of those, and a lot of their parents
Speaker 3: came out saying, what do you mean I can't remember
Speaker 3: my child? You know. So when we made the applications
Speaker 3: with Jamie, we actually kept getting knocked back by the court.
Speaker 3: The prosecution were actually fighting it too. They were actually
Speaker 3: arguing that they didn't think Jamie should be able to
Speaker 3: name her deceased sister. In the end, we were victorious,
Speaker 3: but it was a really it was a very very
Speaker 3: different fight and a very difficult fight in Victoria and
Speaker 3: the survivors who participated in By that time, I'd rebranded
Speaker 3: the campaign from let Her Speak to let Us Speak,
Speaker 3: and we also had male survivors join, so there were
Speaker 3: five male survivors who we did their legal work for,
Speaker 3: and so in time the legislation was reformed. So by
Speaker 3: then I'd obviously pivoted away from reporting just on university
Speaker 3: sexual assault and was now reporting more widely on sexual assault.
Speaker 3: And as I began to listen to people's stories, I
Speaker 3: realized that there was a much bigger story to tell
Speaker 3: about the criminal justice system and how it impacts on
Speaker 3: sexual assault survivors. So the campaign I'm doing now, which
Speaker 3: is called Justice Shouldn't Hurt. I've been following twenty survivors
Speaker 3: through their journeys with criminal justice since about twenty twenty one,
Speaker 3: and you know, stepping through that process with them and
Speaker 3: watching all the things unfold, which has been an incredible
Speaker 3: by Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I want to break that down and get into that
Speaker 1: before we moved past the University of Culture. There I
Speaker 1: would imagine you taking a stand on it. How old
Speaker 1: were you at the time when you were at UNI?
Speaker 3: So I started UNI at age eighteen, okay, and then
Speaker 3: I began I got a job in the department when
Speaker 3: I was twenty three, So I started working there as
Speaker 3: a very junior.
Speaker 1: So what so that type of campaign in the university environment,
Speaker 1: living on campus and all that. First firstly, why did
Speaker 1: you decide to target that and focus on that particular issue?
Speaker 1: But what was the culture of Was it almost like
Speaker 1: UNIQ kids buring unique kids?
Speaker 2: And yeah, it's is that I'm trying to get a sense.
Speaker 1: So sure, because I wouldn't imagine it didn't make you
Speaker 1: the most popular person on campus.
Speaker 2: People would have gone what she on about?
Speaker 1: Because you're trying to change a culture thinking. So I was.
Speaker 3: So I attended Sidney UNI. So, as I mentioned it,
Speaker 3: So at age twenty three, I was sexually assaulted while
Speaker 3: I was in my honors year and I went public
Speaker 3: and so then because of that, I then got a
Speaker 3: job as a tutor in the media department. And I
Speaker 3: think because I was only a few years older than
Speaker 3: my students. They saw me as someone Yeah. So in
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight I had a student disclosed to
Speaker 3: me that she'd been very brutally raped by Saint Paul's student.
Speaker 3: And the following year I'd started my PhD. And she
Speaker 3: recontacted me and she told me his name and so on.
Speaker 3: She recontacted in two thousand and nine she said, have
Speaker 3: a look at this, and it was a Saint Paul's
Speaker 3: Facebook group called defined Statutory pro Rape Anti Consent, and
Speaker 3: the image for the Facebook group was a T shirt
Speaker 3: that says does this shirt make me look like a rapist?
Speaker 3: And all of the members of the group was Saint
Speaker 3: Paul's students. And I asked my student, what would you
Speaker 3: like to do with this, and she said, I want
Speaker 3: to take it to the media because we've tried to
Speaker 3: address the problems. At the time at the college, there
Speaker 3: were all kinds of things like above the bar at
Speaker 3: Saint Paul's they had a thing that says she can't
Speaker 3: say no with a cock in her mouth. There were
Speaker 3: chalkings on the pavements around some of the other colleges
Speaker 3: with things like naked women saying every hole is the goal?
Speaker 3: Just really crass, rape culture type of things. This was
Speaker 3: a sort of tone of the time. So she took
Speaker 3: the story and it was front page news about this
Speaker 3: Facebook group, and this was one of the things that
Speaker 3: really shocked me. What happened next was the people that
Speaker 3: came out to defend and line up and excuse that
Speaker 3: Facebook group were some very senior, powerful individuals. So in
Speaker 3: twenty eighteen, I ended up writing a report called the
Speaker 3: Red Zone Report. We call Orientation Week or O week
Speaker 3: the Red Zone because one in eight of all rapes
Speaker 3: or sexual assaults will happen on campus will happen in
Speaker 3: that one week. So sexual assault services like the New
Speaker 3: South Wales Rape Crisis Center receive a spike in phone
Speaker 3: calls immediately during and then following Orientation Week on campus.
Speaker 3: When I wrote the Red Zone Report, one of the
Speaker 3: saddest stories that I heard was about what actually happens
Speaker 3: to students in the colleges when they blow the whistle.
Speaker 3: You said before, you didn't think, you know, you thought
Speaker 3: I wouldn't be very popular on campus. I was fine
Speaker 3: because I was a staff member. I didn't live in
Speaker 3: any of the colleges. I would go back to my
Speaker 3: home every night. But these students of mine who did
Speaker 3: live on campus, the stories that they would tell me.
Speaker 3: And you know, if people read the red Zone report,
Speaker 3: there's one one particular story of one student who blew
Speaker 3: the whistle on what was happening in the Sydney University colleges.
Speaker 3: And she would walk into after she did that, she
Speaker 3: would walk into the dining hall and sit down at
Speaker 3: one of those long trestle tables that they have, and
Speaker 3: everybody else at the dining table would stand up, turn
Speaker 3: their backs on her and walk away. It was the worst,
Speaker 3: the absolute worst part of this, and a trigger warning obviously,
Speaker 3: but the worst part of this was so at college.
Speaker 3: One of the things that they do is they take
Speaker 3: photos of each other and they put them they decorate
Speaker 3: their bedroom doors in the hallways. And she said, after
Speaker 3: she'd written some articles and she was studying media as well,
Speaker 3: and she had exposed what was happening in the colleges,
Speaker 3: she said, every Monday she would come back and just
Speaker 3: one photo would be pulled down off her door. And
Speaker 3: she didn't know who was doing this or what their
Speaker 3: motivation was, but she knew that it was a psychological
Speaker 3: dig at her and a sign that people didn't want
Speaker 3: her there, and she said every week, every week one
Speaker 3: would be pulled down, one would be pulled down, until
Speaker 3: the final week she came there was only one photo left,
Speaker 3: and she pulled it down herself, and she went inside
Speaker 3: her room and she cut her wrists and she survived.
Speaker 3: But you hear those stories, and these are young.
Speaker 2: People, these are vulnerable people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and incredibly you know here incredibly bright individuals,
Speaker 3: people with bright futures, and they leave these places scarred
Speaker 3: because of what's happening. So, I mean, in the Red
Speaker 3: Zone report, I actually myself and annahush and Shanna Bremner
Speaker 3: who co authored the report with me, we went back
Speaker 3: through about one hundred years of media reports into sexual
Speaker 3: assaults and hazing at the colleges, and we drew this
Speaker 3: massive timeline going back to the thirties showing that this
Speaker 3: had been the sort of sorts of hazing that was
Speaker 3: going on. And hazing can be anything from you know,
Speaker 3: initiation rituals of getting people to eat sheep's hearts or
Speaker 3: drinking goldfish were some of the things that we found
Speaker 3: through to very violent sexual assaults. And so because I'd
Speaker 3: been a staff member and because I'd started to hear
Speaker 3: these stories, and because I had seen the impact that
Speaker 3: that had had on my student when she'd ventilated and
Speaker 3: exposed the Saint Paul's pro rape Facebook group. The fact
Speaker 3: that it wasn't just the institution that defended itself, the
Speaker 3: fact that other people came out of the woodwork to
Speaker 3: stand up behind this Facebook group and to defend the college.
Speaker 3: That was what shocked me the most. And I remember thinking,
Speaker 3: my God, what hope does she have? So that was
Speaker 3: what inspired me, I guess to do that before two.
Speaker 1: I've got to say there and they're just telling that
Speaker 1: story that gave a real good insight into the type
Speaker 1: of thing that goes on there and the culture. What
Speaker 1: you just explained there, I don't see how a reasonable
Speaker 1: person this is not just tom foolery, this is not
Speaker 1: just you know, kids mucking around on the camp has
Speaker 1: been a little bit wild in the UNI days.
Speaker 2: It's disgraceful.
Speaker 3: It was the the stories that are in the Red
Speaker 3: Zone report are still to this day some of the
Speaker 3: most shocking things that I have have reported on. And
Speaker 3: I've reported on gang rapes, I've reported on murders, but
Speaker 3: but I think the tone of some of what was
Speaker 3: going on, I mean thankfully there are. You know, cultural
Speaker 3: change is a really difficult thing and it will take
Speaker 3: it is, but but you have to start somewhere, and
Speaker 3: I think that certainly the conversation is beginning to change
Speaker 3: the It's interesting actually that that report, red Zone. It's
Speaker 3: been back in the news again this year because the
Speaker 3: student does at Sydney University have recently been elected and
Speaker 3: the incoming women's offices handed out copies of the Red
Speaker 3: Zone report and a whole group of male students college
Speaker 3: students decided to rip it up, chanting we don't care,
Speaker 3: we don't care, and.
Speaker 1: Yeah I heard about that, Yeah I didn't fully appreciate
Speaker 1: the significance of it.
Speaker 3: Well, one of the things that was in that report
Speaker 3: was that the report, it's a two hundred page report,
Speaker 3: and it differs from any other report in that I
Speaker 3: actually named names in there. So we had a good
Speaker 3: legal team on that.
Speaker 2: A lot of time spent with the solicitors.
Speaker 3: So we named names, and I also interviewed survivors as
Speaker 3: well as the Kelly family. And if people aren't familiar
Speaker 3: with the Kelly family, they lost one son to a
Speaker 3: one punch kill, one punch attack in King's Cross.
Speaker 2: Our listeners.
Speaker 1: Just to clarify, we've had them on the podcast, right right,
Speaker 1: I'm sure they're famili with them.
Speaker 3: So and then their second son, Stuart, had been at
Speaker 3: Saint Paul's for one night and never slept in his bed,
Speaker 3: and the following day when his parents he called his
Speaker 3: parents desperate to be picked up, and they picked him
Speaker 3: up and he was at the hospital and he said,
Speaker 3: I'm never going back to that place.
Speaker 2: Something traumaticly clearly happened.
Speaker 3: And they've I'm in regular contact with them. I've been
Speaker 3: in contact with the family this week, and they believe
Speaker 3: he was sexually assaulted in haste. His story was told
Speaker 3: in the Red Zone report. I'd interviewed his parents and
Speaker 3: there was you know, there's pictures of Stewart in the report.
Speaker 3: And so when you have a group of students now
Speaker 3: tearing up pages saying we don't care, we don't care.
Speaker 3: These aren't this isn't a report with anonymous quotes. There
Speaker 3: are photos of these families and these students like the
Speaker 3: one who I mentioned before, who who who would sit
Speaker 3: at the dining table and everybody would leave. She's named
Speaker 3: and photographed in that report. So when you have students
Speaker 3: ripping it up saying we don't.
Speaker 2: Care it.
Speaker 3: Is and it's you know, as I said, when that happened,
Speaker 3: I said, look, that's not a slap in the face
Speaker 3: to me as the author. It's a slap in the
Speaker 3: face to the students and the families who have lost
Speaker 3: loved one. That There's also been a case at Sydney
Speaker 3: UNI where back in the seventies a young woman was
Speaker 3: raped and murdered on Saint Paul's campus on the oval
Speaker 3: there and that's never been solved. That was in the report.
Speaker 3: There was also back in the seventies. You know, one
Speaker 3: of the things I found really interesting when I was
Speaker 3: building the timeline was we found examples got like in
Speaker 3: the seventies there was a case an alleged gang rape
Speaker 3: at Saint Paul's and that year after the gang rape,
Speaker 3: they gave trophies for the quote Animal Act of the
Speaker 3: Year to the men who had allegedly committed the gang rape.
Speaker 3: So these are the kinds of stories that are in
Speaker 3: that report. So yeah, have to have students tearing it
Speaker 3: up saying we don't care, it's it shows that there's
Speaker 3: work to be done. Still, obviously.
Speaker 2: That's fairly obvious. Where can people get the red report.
Speaker 3: Can the zone it Google it downloaded, Okay.
Speaker 1: Invite people to have a listen and get a deeper understanding.
Speaker 1: But what you've told me there, and I think I
Speaker 1: could be put in the basket of other people. You
Speaker 1: hear what goes on and the shenanigans that go on
Speaker 1: at UNI. But when you break it down there there
Speaker 1: that's violent, criminal behavior, that's.
Speaker 3: And there have been deaths, multiple deaths. There's also been
Speaker 3: deaths because of alcohol.
Speaker 1: Lives have been destroyed. Yeah, and then then to make
Speaker 1: the culture that anyone that stands up or has been
Speaker 1: a victim in that situation to then be ostracized in
Speaker 1: such a cruel way like taking the photo down.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's and I think one of the things that's
Speaker 3: really I mean, I find the psychology hazing really interesting
Speaker 3: to try to understand and unpack what's going on in
Speaker 3: these cultures. And I think, you know, one thing that's
Speaker 3: for me that I learned when I was doing that
Speaker 3: research was when you have eighteen year olds who are
Speaker 3: just graduating from high school and their lives are going
Speaker 3: through a whole lot of transitions. So it's not just
Speaker 3: the transition from high school to university it's also their
Speaker 3: transition of going from seventeen to eighteen and being able
Speaker 3: to legally drink for the first time. It's also the
Speaker 3: first time they're moving out of home. So for a
Speaker 3: variety of reasons they're going into these environments. And of course,
Speaker 3: as human beings, we all have a need to belong.
Speaker 3: And when you've got a lot of transition and you're
Speaker 3: looking around trying to establish, well, what are the rules
Speaker 3: of this place, whose top dog, how do I fit in?
Speaker 3: How do I get on here? And then on day one,
Speaker 3: week one of orientation Week or they now call it
Speaker 3: welcome Week, someone says all you have to do is,
Speaker 3: you know, participate in this drinking game or you know,
Speaker 3: do this and what are often quite lighthearted to start
Speaker 3: off with initiation rituals, like one of them at the time,
Speaker 3: back in the day used to be carrying two bricks
Speaker 3: around campus all week. Annoying, yep. But if that's what
Speaker 3: you do and then you get instant membership, instant love,
Speaker 3: instant family, that's incredibly seductive. That's incredibly enticing when you're
Speaker 3: that age and you're desperate to belong, And so what
Speaker 3: would happen is that you would have normal reasonable eighteen
Speaker 3: year olds, seventeen year olds, eighteen year olds who go
Speaker 3: to these places for the first time, and within a
Speaker 3: very short period of time, their normal morals and their
Speaker 3: normal standards of behavior can be very quickly replaced. And
Speaker 3: at first it feels good.
Speaker 1: It feels good as you identified the psychology of everyone
Speaker 1: wanting to belong and you're at a vulnerable stage at
Speaker 1: that age, insecure or you've got your freedom, and if.
Speaker 3: The price of membership at first is you know, a
Speaker 3: hazing ritual that you know, for most people who go
Speaker 3: through college, you know, the majority won't they obviously they're
Speaker 3: not going to die, they're not going to be raped.
Speaker 3: For most people, the hazing ritual may be something that
Speaker 3: they look back on in twenty years and think, God,
Speaker 3: that was a bit silly, but at the time it
Speaker 3: was fun. And also, as human beings, we bond through
Speaker 3: shared adversity. So when you've got a group of first
Speaker 3: years or they call them freshers, and they're all having
Speaker 3: to you know, drink till they vomit or whatever it is,
Speaker 3: the next day, after you've participated in that group bonding activity,
Speaker 3: you actually feel solidarity with the other people that went
Speaker 3: through that with you. So because I mean, if you
Speaker 3: look at the army, or if you look.
Speaker 1: At I was thinking, like tactical policing, they break you
Speaker 1: all down, your share the pain, and they punish you
Speaker 1: and then your.
Speaker 2: Mates for life.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and that's part of it's human nature, isn't the
Speaker 1: psychology of it?
Speaker 3: It is, so I can understand why then those individuals
Speaker 3: who have gone through those shared bonding, shared adversity experiences
Speaker 3: then do firstly feel very connected to each other, but
Speaker 3: also why then when you have an outsider like a
Speaker 3: journalist criticizing that culture, they become very very defensive. So
Speaker 3: they develop we call it a siege mentality where if anything,
Speaker 3: they sort of they bunk it down. You are painted
Speaker 3: as the outsider and the enemy, and so that can
Speaker 3: actually at times, that can It's sort of it's a
Speaker 3: paradox as a journalist because on the one hand, you
Speaker 3: want to shine a light and document what's happening in
Speaker 3: the culture in order to demonstrate the need for cultural change.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, I'm conscious that every time
Speaker 3: I write these articles or I produce something like the
Speaker 3: Red Zone Report, there is a risk that you then
Speaker 3: further entrench that culture.
Speaker 1: You're pushing against them, and so they bunk it down
Speaker 1: and come back harder or more resilient in the world.
Speaker 3: Well, or they changed their tactics. So one of the
Speaker 3: things that happened in twenty fourteen was their Wesley College
Speaker 3: at Sydney University had produced this magazine called the RAQWB
Speaker 3: where they were documenting all of the students who had
Speaker 3: hooked up with each other. And it was this sort
Speaker 3: of slut shaming document and that was exposed by some
Speaker 3: of the students who were whistleblowers. These whistleblowers at Wesley
Speaker 3: College had exposed what was happening, and the response, well,
Speaker 3: one of the responses to that was to then not
Speaker 3: change the culture, just ban mobile phones at parties and
Speaker 3: you know, getting people to in other words, becoming more secretive, becoming.
Speaker 2: More in solid closed doors exactly.
Speaker 3: And so we know that when these stories do in
Speaker 3: the media and there is for a brief moment a spotlight,
Speaker 3: the reaction tends to be from within the culture tends
Speaker 3: to be highly defensive and then to become more secretive,
Speaker 3: more insular, to implement more I guess protections around to
Speaker 3: try to sort of shield out the media and to
Speaker 3: blame the media. And I remember like, actually, you know,
Speaker 3: you asked me at the beginning, who am I and
Speaker 3: where did I come from? So when I was in
Speaker 3: year twelve, you know, back being being editor of one
Speaker 3: of the editors of the school newspaper, I went to
Speaker 3: a school called PLC Croyden and one of our schools,
Speaker 3: the schools in the area, called Trinity Grammar, was on
Speaker 3: the front page of the Daily Telegraph. There was a
Speaker 3: big news story that came out where a number of
Speaker 3: the boarders in the boarding house had been held down
Speaker 3: in sexually assaulted and there was an implement that was
Speaker 3: made in woodwork class that they called the anaconda, and
Speaker 3: they were using this to rape the boys, the older boarders.
Speaker 3: And I remember when that story broke so distinctly because
Speaker 3: a lot of us girls, you know, we used to
Speaker 3: do debates against Trinity Grammar. A lot of us if
Speaker 3: we had brothers, our brothers went to Trinity Grammar.
Speaker 2: You've had an affiliation with the school.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we had social dances together, if we had boyfriends,
Speaker 3: they might go to Trinity Grammar, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: So when that story broke, it didn't just impact their school,
Speaker 3: it impacted our school, and a lot of the boarders
Speaker 3: in our boarding house had brothers in that boarding house.
Speaker 3: And I remember walking into the year twelve common room
Speaker 3: having read the story and having been utterly disgusted and horrified,
Speaker 3: And one of the first things that I heard in
Speaker 3: our common room was, Oh, it's just a media beat up. Oh,
Speaker 3: the media is these people who are writing these stories
Speaker 3: are just jealous that they can't afford to go to
Speaker 3: schools like ours.
Speaker 2: And it's a wrong response to this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And then hearing the same sort of attitudes by
Speaker 3: the parents at school pickup of oh, it's just boys
Speaker 3: being boys, you know, all of these attitudes which minimize, downplay, shift, responsibility,
Speaker 3: cover up. And I remember at the time as a
Speaker 3: you know, I would have been about seventeen at this point,
Speaker 3: being horrified by the violence, but also horrified by the
Speaker 3: attitudes that were unfolding around me. And unfortunately, what happened
Speaker 3: in that case was the school, Trinity Grammar, engaged a
Speaker 3: crisis comms manager and that person who and I know
Speaker 3: this person, that person their job was to spin the
Speaker 3: story in the media. Now, this was a case of
Speaker 3: game rape, and numerous numerous attacks had happened. The boys
Speaker 3: responsible were charged with sexual assaults. But what this common
Speaker 3: specialist did was instead of talking about instead of using
Speaker 3: the term sexual assault, he started using the word bullying.
Speaker 3: There's a bullying problem in our boarding houses. And so
Speaker 3: the conversation very quickly moved away from gang rape. And
Speaker 3: you can actually go back and look at all the
Speaker 3: headlines at the time. And after six months, by the
Speaker 3: time the case finally went to trial, the media went
Speaker 3: referring to it as sexual assault anymore. They were referring
Speaker 3: to it as bullying. And of course bullying is a
Speaker 3: much more sanitized term. And of course the moment you
Speaker 3: change the goalposts and we're no longer talking about sexual violence,
Speaker 3: we're now talking about a culture of bullying. The school
Speaker 3: then decided that they would call themselves a victim of
Speaker 3: bullying by the big bad media, and so and the
Speaker 3: principle at the time put out this horrendous newsletter saying
Speaker 3: that the school's being bullying. And so this whole victim
Speaker 3: mentality sits in of where the culture becomes defensive, hyper defensive.
Speaker 3: But also they other the attacker as being the media,
Speaker 3: that the media are the ones at fault. We're the
Speaker 3: poor victims here where being bullied. This is a bullying
Speaker 3: problem that we alves are the bullying victims. And you know,
Speaker 3: one of the things that I've always said is that
Speaker 3: had that I mean, the media comms crisis guy did
Speaker 3: an extraordinary job. I think had that been managed differently,
Speaker 3: that Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
Speaker 3: that we got up in twenty eighteen, I was at school.
Speaker 3: This was back in two thousand. We could have had
Speaker 3: that Royal commission eighteen years earlier, had that conversation played
Speaker 3: out differently in the media. And this is what this
Speaker 3: is also what got me really interested about, well, what
Speaker 3: is the media's role in these moments? How what is
Speaker 3: the role of the media to shape and direct the
Speaker 3: conversation towards different ends? And in that moment, the media
Speaker 3: missed a pivotal opportunity to talk about sexual assault in
Speaker 3: these institutions.
Speaker 1: I look at that and it always amazes me where
Speaker 1: they talk about that was bullying and it's boys being boys.
Speaker 2: It was clearly sexual assault.
Speaker 1: You can't dress it up any other way, but it
Speaker 1: gets lost in the narrative and the telling and what
Speaker 1: that media consultant did, Yes he spun it, but the public.
Speaker 1: And when I say the public, I'm not saying everyone
Speaker 1: out there, but I know there would be a narrative
Speaker 1: within the public too. It's boys being boys. That's not
Speaker 1: boys being boys. It's sexual assault, violent sexual assault.
Speaker 2: And how do they hide behind that type of commentary?
Speaker 3: And I think I mean that sort of language, which
Speaker 3: part of it is a language issue about minimizing and
Speaker 3: reframing and so on and justifying. I think also the
Speaker 3: fact that the victims were male. And you know, keep
Speaker 3: in mind, so this is more than two decades ago
Speaker 3: now this as I said, it was about two thousand
Speaker 3: that this happened. Thankfully, I think we've come a long
Speaker 3: way nowadays with understanding that sexual violence impacts boys too,
Speaker 3: but particularly back then, that was very much erased from
Speaker 3: the conversation. It was like we didn't have the appropriate
Speaker 3: frameworks or language to properly discuss sexual violence a targeting boys.
Speaker 2: Would I take it further?
Speaker 1: Would you also think back when we're going back two decades,
Speaker 1: it's almost too confronting that boys at this, yeah, highly
Speaker 1: reputable school are involved in homosexual rates. Yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: word that they want to bring in that they're not homosexual,
Speaker 1: they're just being boys being boys. That's really the discussion,
Speaker 1: isn't it.
Speaker 3: So you're absolutely right there is a homophobia. Yeah, in
Speaker 3: playing into this as well, Yeah, without doubt in a
Speaker 3: past life again sort of jumping around the.
Speaker 2: We've got to jump because we're having this conversation.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking the conversation we're having now would be remarkably
Speaker 1: different from twenty years ago to where we are now.
Speaker 2: But thank god we've evolved.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, the thing I was going to say was
Speaker 3: I was also part of a team that was led
Speaker 3: by Professor Catherine Lumbee who the team was responsible for
Speaker 3: doing research into NRL footy players and then developing educational
Speaker 3: frameworks to address their attitudes towards violence against women and consent.
Speaker 3: And when Professor Lumbee was doing the research, one of
Speaker 3: the do you want me to tell me the story
Speaker 3: of Okay, so what had happened?
Speaker 1: I'm from the notes out here in the Yeah, ch
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by what you're saying.
Speaker 3: So this was back in around two thousand and four,
Speaker 3: I believe it was. There was a very famous incident
Speaker 3: involving the Bulldogs and allegations of a rape.
Speaker 2: Up at Coffs Harbor I remember it.
Speaker 3: And at the time, the CEO was a guy called
Speaker 3: David Gallup and he contacted Professor Catherine Lumby and said,
Speaker 3: so she was my supervisor and mentor, and he said
Speaker 3: what do we do? And she essentially said, well, are
Speaker 3: you asking me as a media expert because you want
Speaker 3: a crisis comms plan? Or are you asking me as
Speaker 3: a gender expert because you want help? And he made
Speaker 3: it very clear that they had a problem and they
Speaker 3: needed help with the culture. And so Catherine Lumby's response was, well,
Speaker 3: the first thing is that you can't just roll out
Speaker 3: some pre existing off the shelf education program because you've
Speaker 3: got a very unique culture and you're going to have
Speaker 3: to develop something tailored from the ground up. So Catherine said,
Speaker 3: the first thing that we need to do is actually
Speaker 3: do the research and take the temperature of the culture
Speaker 3: and get a snapshot of what's going on. And part
Speaker 3: of that research, there were a whole bunch of people
Speaker 3: that did that research. Part of what they did was
Speaker 3: they asked players, player managers, women who had interactions with
Speaker 3: the clubs, etc. About their experiences. And you don't ask
Speaker 3: people have you ever raped somebody? Because most people who
Speaker 3: have committed sexual violence. A, they're not going to admit it,
Speaker 3: but B most of the time they don't actually realize
Speaker 3: that that's what they're doing. They don't classify it necessarily
Speaker 3: as rape. So they asked them to tell us about
Speaker 3: a night that turned pear shaped, what does that look?
Speaker 3: And from that they got some really rich data around
Speaker 3: what was happening back then, and they found there were
Speaker 3: some very interesting findings. One of them was that individuals
Speaker 3: who would express horror at the concept of rape, who
Speaker 3: would then go on to admit to having done something
Speaker 3: that met the legal definition of rape, like having I'm
Speaker 3: using quotations, having sex with a pasted out woman. But
Speaker 3: they also found that there were individuals who were in
Speaker 3: the code who were horrified by what was going on
Speaker 3: but didn't have the skill sets or the language to
Speaker 3: speak up. And I'll never forget there was one story
Speaker 3: that has always stuck with me of and I'll do
Speaker 3: identify it. But if you can imagine an eighteen year
Speaker 3: old kid who's from a country town, who's never been
Speaker 3: to the big smoke, and he's plucked out of that
Speaker 3: country town and he's put into an A grade team
Speaker 3: and they're at an away game, because that's where many
Speaker 3: of the unethical things would happen because you don't have
Speaker 3: the usual handbrakes in place. There's a woman involved, and
Speaker 3: there's a team involved, and there's a lot of alcohol involved,
Speaker 3: and he sitting there looking down into his beer, thinking
Speaker 3: what's happening right now is not okay? How does he
Speaker 3: speak up in that moment? And that's not to excuse
Speaker 3: not speaking up, but it's to realize that within any
Speaker 3: of these environments, there's often more than one victim, and
Speaker 3: there are people who walk out of that very very scarred,
Speaker 3: who wish they had the skills to be able to intervene,
Speaker 3: and they're what I consider the sleeper cells. How do
Speaker 3: we access these people who actually did I remember someone
Speaker 3: once told me she called it the five percent dickhead rule,
Speaker 3: which is in any culture, in any community, in any organization,
Speaker 3: in any company, there are going to be five percent
Speaker 3: of people who are just flat out of dickheads. They're
Speaker 3: always born dickheads. They're going to stay do.
Speaker 2: I think that's a pretty good rule.
Speaker 3: And there's also the opposite five percent of people who
Speaker 3: are very very ethical, strongly minded individuals. And the challenge
Speaker 3: is the ninety percent in the middle, and who are
Speaker 3: they being laid by. Is it the bottom five percent
Speaker 3: who are setting the tone or is it the top
Speaker 3: five percent? And one of the challenges with the NRL
Speaker 3: at the time was a lot of the culture was
Speaker 3: being set by some of the bottom five percent. So
Speaker 3: how do you find firstly, how do you identify that
Speaker 3: top five percent who are actually in there, but they're
Speaker 3: quiet and they're disempowered. How do you find them? How
Speaker 3: do you equip them with the skills to become leaders
Speaker 3: and get them to actually shift the tone of the culture.
Speaker 3: The other thing that the research I'm just remembering the
Speaker 3: research found back then was that there were also a
Speaker 3: whole lot of behaviors that were going on that weren't
Speaker 3: technically criminal, but they were certainly unethical. So I'll give
Speaker 3: you an example, having sex, having consensual sex with a woman.
Speaker 3: Everything's fine, everything's consensual, orgasms all around, everybody's happy, and
Speaker 3: then five minutes after it's over, saying fuck off your
Speaker 3: slag and throwing clothes at her. Is it criminal?
Speaker 2: It does cross the line of criminal, but there's an
Speaker 2: ethical and.
Speaker 3: Moral absolutely, And so as a result of that, one
Speaker 3: of the things that became very apparent was that it's
Speaker 3: not just it's not enough just to educate people about
Speaker 3: the laws around consent, because the laws AT's a very
Speaker 3: very base.
Speaker 1: Because I go as far to say that in the
Speaker 1: scenario you put there, if someone's prepared to do that,
Speaker 1: I think it's a very fine line between then sexually
Speaker 1: abusing someone.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, their moral compass is way off.
Speaker 3: Skill absolutely, which is why the work that was being
Speaker 3: done back then with the NRL that there was a
Speaker 3: very very strong emphasis on it's not enough just to
Speaker 3: teach laws. You have to have that ethical component and
Speaker 3: you have to have that ethical framework otherwise you do
Speaker 3: get these sorts.
Speaker 1: Of It makes a lot of sense in what you're saying,
Speaker 1: how do you get these people you said, skills? My
Speaker 1: word was going to come out courage, because I think
Speaker 1: I might be that articulate, but if I've got the
Speaker 1: courage to do something, I'll make it clear. But it
Speaker 1: takes people with the backbone to stand up and say
Speaker 1: things like that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it's really interesting because there is a lot of
Speaker 3: research around and why do bystanders in these situations either
Speaker 3: take action or not take action? And what the research
Speaker 3: shows is that in order for someone to be what's
Speaker 3: good an ethical bystanderd to actually take action, There's a
Speaker 3: whole sort of things that have to be in place first.
Speaker 3: So they have to recognize the problem as a problem.
Speaker 3: They have to because not you know, sometimes people don't
Speaker 3: know what it is that they're looking at. They have
Speaker 3: to interpret it as a problem. They also have to
Speaker 3: feel sufficiently personally responsible, because often people will look around
Speaker 3: and think, well, why is it my job to like,
Speaker 3: you know, they're waiting for somebody else to take charge.
Speaker 3: And they also have to feel that they have sufficient
Speaker 3: personal power and social power that if they do speak
Speaker 3: up it's not going to backfire on them, that they're
Speaker 3: not going to socially embarrass themselves or lose face in
Speaker 3: that moment. And one of the things that I remember
Speaker 3: looking at some research that came out of the US
Speaker 3: about this idea of ethical bystander behavior and how do
Speaker 3: you promote it. There was a group that was actually
Speaker 3: they were actually looking at the issue of bullying in schools,
Speaker 3: and they went into a school and they did a
Speaker 3: survey to find out how many of the students used
Speaker 3: bullying type behaviors or had say pro bulling attitude. So
Speaker 3: they excused bulling behavior, and they found that one in
Speaker 3: five students had was using bullying tactics or was enabling bullying.
Speaker 3: And so the researchers went back to the school and
Speaker 3: they did a school presentation and assembly and they didn't
Speaker 3: say to the students one in five of you are
Speaker 3: bullies or one in five of you you know a
Speaker 3: little shit. They did the opposite. They said, four in
Speaker 3: five of you are not bullies. Well done, give yourselves
Speaker 3: a pat on the back.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 3: And this is what we call positive social norm theory,
Speaker 3: where what you're trying to do is you're trying to
Speaker 3: reinforce the dominant positive behavior as the social norm. Because
Speaker 3: what that does is if you're sitting in that assembly
Speaker 3: hall and you're one of the five who is a bully,
Speaker 3: you suddenly realize you're actually in the minority.
Speaker 1: The two people are that would make you feel uncomfortable
Speaker 1: for all of a sudden, thinking you've got the power,
Speaker 1: it's been taken away with you, absolutely taken away from
Speaker 1: you us, you'd say, and.
Speaker 3: You're in the minority where and you know, we're social animals,
Speaker 3: were herd animals. We want to know the safety empower
Speaker 3: in numbers. But it also lets those four in five
Speaker 3: people know, hey, if you do speak up when you
Speaker 3: see something, you know, if it's a racist comment or
Speaker 3: a sexist comment or whatever it is, or a homophobic comment,
Speaker 3: if you speak up, four in five of the people
Speaker 3: around you are actually really relieved that you did that
Speaker 3: and actually supportive of you doing that. And so what
Speaker 3: they found after they presented the research was that they
Speaker 3: they they went away, and then they came back and
Speaker 3: they they did the research again with the school, and
Speaker 3: they found that just by having done that one intervention
Speaker 3: of presenting that research in that way to the students,
Speaker 3: the rates of bulling dropped further. And when they went back,
Speaker 3: they found that ninety percent of students now didn't engage
Speaker 3: in bulling behavior. And we're not supportive of bulling behavior.
Speaker 3: So there's some really interesting ramifications for this sort of
Speaker 3: research because often if you look at how we talk about, say,
Speaker 3: sexual violence in Australia, and I know yesterday you mentioned
Speaker 3: to me about, you know, rape myths and so on,
Speaker 3: and one of the things that I've been really interested
Speaker 3: in is okay, so if you look at how we
Speaker 3: talk about things, we might see a statistic that says
Speaker 3: one in five I think it is young Australians believe
Speaker 3: that if a woman was drunk when sexually assaulted, that
Speaker 3: she was in she was part way responsible for the
Speaker 3: sexual violence. Okay, we should actually be reframing that statistic
Speaker 3: in the reverse, we should actually be saying four in
Speaker 3: five young Australians do not believe that a person who
Speaker 3: is drunk is responsible if they experience sexual violence, because
Speaker 3: what that does is it reaffirms the positive and we know,
Speaker 3: again from research like with juries, there's this paradox that
Speaker 3: every time you mention a rape myth in order to
Speaker 3: critique it ironically, you actually end up reaffirming and reinforcing
Speaker 3: that rape myth because that's what people remember. So we
Speaker 3: need to really quite radically change our approach to how
Speaker 3: we discuss rape myths and sexual violence. So in you know,
Speaker 3: some of the reporting that I'm doing, I try to
Speaker 3: focus on the positive social norm of what people you know,
Speaker 3: the fact that the majority of Australians don't think that
Speaker 3: someone who is drunk is responsible if they're experiencing sexual violence,
Speaker 3: and keep normalizing that as this is what most people believe,
Speaker 3: because it calls out those who then hold that minority
Speaker 3: viewpoint rather than reinforcing the minority viewpoint. But of course
Speaker 3: one of the challenges as a journalist is that we
Speaker 3: know that, you know, we focus on the shocking statistics,
Speaker 3: the shock factor.
Speaker 1: How do you get there the cross Yeah, But I
Speaker 1: find it fascinating what you're saying and just whinding it
Speaker 1: back to the school situation all of a sudden, that's
Speaker 1: you've ostracized the bully. Yeah, by just changing the terminology
Speaker 1: and the way it's approached. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And there was there was a case in Steubenville in
Speaker 3: the US where so that's a little country town and
Speaker 3: there was a football team who were the pride and
Speaker 3: joy of this town, the school, the high school football team,
Speaker 3: and there was a party one night and following a game,
Speaker 3: and at the first part of the party, the players
Speaker 3: were getting quite drunk. What happened was the party then
Speaker 3: moved on and at the second location there was a
Speaker 3: girl who was passed out in the basement and she
Speaker 3: was sexually assaulted and that was filmed on camera, and
Speaker 3: then that went viral on the internet, and a group
Speaker 3: called Anonymous then sort of went and tracked down the
Speaker 3: individuals responsible and so on, and it blew up into
Speaker 3: this massive, massive front page court case that went international.
Speaker 3: But there was one individual there that night who I've
Speaker 3: become I was quite interested in, a guy called Evan Westlake.
Speaker 3: Now he was not one of the perpetrators and he
Speaker 3: wasn't one of the victims. Earlier on in the night,
Speaker 3: when they'd been at the first party and everybody was drinking,
Speaker 3: he saw one of his mates get very very drunk
Speaker 3: and go to get his car keys to drive home,
Speaker 3: and in that moment, Evan Westlake stepped in, took his
Speaker 3: mate's car keys off him, told him not to drive,
Speaker 3: and got his mate home safely. So, you know, ten
Speaker 3: out of ten ethical bystander behavior. Great work. Later on
Speaker 3: in the night, at the second house party, Evan Westlake
Speaker 3: actually walked in on the sexual assault of the unconscious
Speaker 3: girl in progress. And when he walked in, he said,
Speaker 3: night boys, I'm heading.
Speaker 2: Off, and he left, didn't address it.
Speaker 3: And later when he was at the trial, they asked him.
Speaker 3: He actually gave evidence for the victims to support the victims,
Speaker 3: and they asked him, why didn't you say something? Why
Speaker 3: didn't you why didn't you speak up? Why didn't you
Speaker 3: do something in that moment? And he said because I
Speaker 3: didn't know that's what rape looked like. And what I
Speaker 3: find really interesting about that example is that this is,
Speaker 3: you know, he thought rape was someone who jumps out
Speaker 3: from behind the bushes.
Speaker 2: Wearing a balaclav wearing.
Speaker 3: A bellaclava, who's physically very violent. That you see that
Speaker 3: you also see signs of resistance from the victim. He
Speaker 3: wasn't taught what consent was. He wasn't taught what sexual
Speaker 3: violence actually looks like. So this is an otherwise. You know,
Speaker 3: this is a guy who earlier on that same evening
Speaker 3: had demonstrated the capacity to act as an ethical bystander,
Speaker 3: but in a sexual astay situation he did not, and
Speaker 3: he felt very, very guilty about that after all.
Speaker 1: So I wouldn't have expected that answer from him. I
Speaker 1: thought it would have been, well, I couldn't have done anything.
Speaker 1: I was scared, I was the whole range of things.
Speaker 1: But I didn't expect that, and that came across the
Speaker 1: way you relate that they're very truthful, And.
Speaker 3: What you know, one of the things that when I've
Speaker 3: written about this case is that I've said that Evan
Speaker 3: Westlake's choices that night reflect both the success of drink
Speaker 3: driving messaging in America. Sorry, but the absolute failure of
Speaker 3: consent and sexual violence prevention education because this is an
Speaker 3: individual who otherwise had he had the knowledge. And that's
Speaker 3: why I said before. You know, when we talk about
Speaker 3: ethical bystanders and the factors which encourage someone to take
Speaker 3: an intervention step, the very first thing is noticing the
Speaker 3: harm and interpreting the harm correctly. You can have all
Speaker 3: the ethical bystanders skills in the world, which he did,
Speaker 3: but he didn't notice the harm or interpret the harm correctly.
Speaker 3: So that's why, you know, if we're looking at well,
Speaker 3: what does it mean to do effective sexual violence prevention
Speaker 3: education in Australia. Absolutely we need consent education, but we
Speaker 3: need to really also talk about, well, what does sexual
Speaker 3: violence look like? What is it? And not shy away
Speaker 3: from these conversations. I've got a three year old son now,
Speaker 3: and you know, we keep it age appropriate, but we're
Speaker 3: already talking about consent in terms of his body and
Speaker 3: sharing toys and you know, not taking other toys without
Speaker 3: other people's toys without asking, and giving hugs, and you know,
Speaker 3: like you keep it age appropriate, but you can introduce
Speaker 3: those concepts very early on.
Speaker 2: And I think there is a role to play.
Speaker 1: Like we've talked when the kids have left home or
Speaker 1: where young adults have left home at university or starting
Speaker 1: in the football team, but it starts from an early age,
Speaker 1: doesn't in the home? What's acceptable what's not acceptable? Tell
Speaker 1: me with the football culture. And we're winding back to
Speaker 1: two thousand and four, do you think there's been progress?
Speaker 3: I don't know, And I think until there is research
Speaker 3: to demonstrate one way or the other, I wouldn't want
Speaker 3: to hypothesize. I think that within the wider community there
Speaker 3: is certainly evolution and growth, and I think we've become
Speaker 3: a lot more comfortable talking about these problems than we
Speaker 3: used to be. I remember when I first went public
Speaker 3: as a survivor myself. That was back in two thousand
Speaker 3: and seven, and it was a completely different context. And
Speaker 3: I you know, I sometimes think that you know, the
Speaker 3: younger generations, you don't know what you don't know and
Speaker 3: fair enough, and like when I went public, there weren't
Speaker 3: very many other survivors of sexual violence who had gone public.
Speaker 3: There was teag and Wagner, but it was very you know,
Speaker 3: this was before the media movement, before and before social
Speaker 3: I think, you know, one of the things that social
Speaker 3: media has done is that it's made survivors visible to
Speaker 3: each other, that you can connect with each other not
Speaker 3: just through a hashtag, but through meaningful online engagement with
Speaker 3: there's you know, with online groups and so on. And
Speaker 3: I think that people finding community on.
Speaker 2: The strength in the fact that you're not law.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and I think that that has definitely, you know,
Speaker 3: for a crime which is so steeped in often anyway,
Speaker 3: it's often steeped in shame and stigma and isolation. Social
Speaker 3: media has been a real antidote in terms of being
Speaker 3: able to break down that isolation. And then in turn,
Speaker 3: I think over time, then people once they find each
Speaker 3: other and they're able to distill through some of the
Speaker 3: issues and make sense. And you know, often you know,
Speaker 3: survivors will be much harder on themselves than they would
Speaker 3: ever be on their worst enemy. They will blame themselves
Speaker 3: when they would never blame somebody else who'd been through
Speaker 3: their experience. And when they see that reflected in other
Speaker 3: in peers, that can help build the confidence to their
Speaker 3: own and re well.
Speaker 1: Not even sexual assaults, but I see victims in a
Speaker 1: lot of crimes sometimes blame themselves and they're the victims,
Speaker 1: and you have to point that out that you're not
Speaker 1: to blame. It's not by your actions or you walk there,
Speaker 1: or you did this or you should have done that.
Speaker 2: You're a victim.
Speaker 1: Someone's committed the offense. You're not to blame for it.
Speaker 1: But I think it's just part of the psyche that
Speaker 1: victims go through when they're mulling over what's happened. How
Speaker 1: could they prevented that. I'm curious because I look at it,
Speaker 1: and you've taught me a lot, just in the short
Speaker 1: conversation as you've reckmen notes, but you've taught You've taught
Speaker 1: me a lot. I always think in those organizations and
Speaker 1: I look at it, I look at it a blow
Speaker 1: key point of view in the football environment, and I
Speaker 1: see that groups of males. How do you have educate
Speaker 1: people to really stand up and be strong? Because I can,
Speaker 1: let's take it away from sexual assault, corruption within the police.
Speaker 1: I know there's some charismatic people that are in the
Speaker 1: areas I've worked in. If they take people down the
Speaker 1: wrong path, people tend to follow, and it's only a
Speaker 1: few that will stand up. How do we get those
Speaker 1: role models? Because I think it's not just males that
Speaker 1: can females as well. How do we create those role
Speaker 1: models where people feel empowered to stand up and you're
Speaker 1: not going to get criticized. Some people might not like you,
Speaker 1: and you you might lose some aspects of your friendships
Speaker 1: or your career.
Speaker 2: But how are we going to encourage people to speak up?
Speaker 3: So I think the first thing is that it's not
Speaker 3: about trying to change the individual. It's about changing the
Speaker 3: environment around them so that if a person does take
Speaker 3: the step to speak up, they know what the response
Speaker 3: is going to be and they feel safe to do it.
Speaker 3: So it's about changing the environment to make it very
Speaker 3: clear to people that if you do speak up about
Speaker 3: whatever the problem is, that there will be that the
Speaker 3: reaction from the institution or the organization or the community
Speaker 3: will be a supportive reaction, because when you know people
Speaker 3: are if you hear you know, somebody tells And we've
Speaker 3: all done this, We've all, every single one of us
Speaker 3: has been in a situation in our life where we've
Speaker 3: heard a joke that has crossed the line or a
Speaker 3: comment that's crossed the line, and it's made us uncomfortable,
Speaker 3: and we've known it's wrong, and we wanted to say something,
Speaker 3: but we didn't. And if you look at and you
Speaker 3: unpack why didn't we, often it's because there is a
Speaker 3: fear of social failure if we speak up and we
Speaker 3: get it wrong, or that we're going to speak up
Speaker 3: and then we're going to become the next target of
Speaker 3: the bully or the person who's making the inappropriate comment.
Speaker 3: So part of the way you change that is is
Speaker 3: that you I mean, ideally you change the behavior in
Speaker 3: the first place, and you'd prevent those attitudes to begin with.
Speaker 3: But failing that, the way that you address that is
Speaker 3: that you make it really clear that if a person
Speaker 3: speaks up, the social response is not going to be
Speaker 3: one of backlash or one of humiliation. It's going to
Speaker 3: be one of relief. And that's one of the things
Speaker 3: that people are often really surprised to learn is that
Speaker 3: I remember doing a workshop this is again in a
Speaker 3: previous role of my previous life, but doing a workshop
Speaker 3: with some high school students, some high school boys, about
Speaker 3: ethical bystander behavior, and we were exploring a situation, a
Speaker 3: true story, true situation that had happened where a group
Speaker 3: of young guys, high school students, I think they're about
Speaker 3: fifteen years old, had been at a party. Parents were
Speaker 3: away for the weekend house party, etc. One of the
Speaker 3: boys had passed out drunk and his mates, having a joke,
Speaker 3: having a laugh, got out the old magic marker and
Speaker 3: you know, started drawing things on his face and you know,
Speaker 3: writing things on his on his body. And then one
Speaker 3: of the kids took it one step further and decided
Speaker 3: to super glue this kid's eyelashes shut, thinking that when
Speaker 3: he woke up and his eyelashes with super glued shut,
Speaker 3: he'd think he you know, he was literally blind and
Speaker 3: you know, blah blah blah. You can see how this
Speaker 3: can happen, right, And they did that, and then one
Speaker 3: of the friends went, you know what, We've gone too far.
Speaker 3: We shouldn't have done this. I'm going to google what
Speaker 3: removes super glue? Do you know what removes super glued?
Speaker 2: What does remove super glue?
Speaker 1: I've never I've never super glued anyone's eyelashes.
Speaker 3: So one of the things is acetone, right, okay, So
Speaker 3: now polish removing exactly. So they google this and they're like,
Speaker 3: all right, now polish remover. So they go off and
Speaker 3: they find and the mother's now polish remover and they're
Speaker 3: just about to start putting now polish remover on this
Speaker 3: kid's eyes. When the same kid who had said I
Speaker 3: don't think we should have you know, this has gone
Speaker 3: too far says, I don't know if we should be
Speaker 3: doing this. I'm going to call my mom now. The
Speaker 3: moment that fifteen year old boy says, I'm going to
Speaker 3: call my mom, how did the other fifteen year old
Speaker 3: boys react.
Speaker 2: Oh, they would have gone in the panic.
Speaker 3: Mate, it died, call your mom. And thankfully, this particular
Speaker 3: kid had the kind of relationship with his parents. The
Speaker 3: mother was a nurse, and the kind of relationship where
Speaker 3: he felt empowered to do that and knew that he
Speaker 3: would not get in trouble. Knew that the response from
Speaker 3: mum would be helpful. So he called his mum and
Speaker 3: the mum said, do not put now polishing anywhey, that's
Speaker 3: kid's eyes. Now polish remover can cause blindness. And she said,
Speaker 3: I'm coming straight over. She got, she came up, They
Speaker 3: got the kid to hospital. They had to pluck out
Speaker 3: his eyelashes from memory, but they saved the kid's eyesight.
Speaker 3: And I was doing this having this conversation with this
Speaker 3: group of young guys and I said, you know, put
Speaker 3: yourself in the shoes of that kid when he says,
Speaker 3: I'm going to call my mom and all of your
Speaker 3: mates are saying no, no, no, no, no where we're going
Speaker 3: to get busted. You know, we're all drinking under it.
Speaker 3: You know, how hard is it to be that kid
Speaker 3: when all of your mates are telling you no and
Speaker 3: to follow through and call your mum.
Speaker 2: It's hard.
Speaker 3: But now put yourself in his shoes the next day,
Speaker 3: when a doctor tells you, well done, su, you just
Speaker 3: saved your mate's eye sight, how good do you feel
Speaker 3: in that moment? And so all of us, at some
Speaker 3: point in our life have been in that position where
Speaker 3: we should have done something and we didn't, and we
Speaker 3: felt regret later and we felt shame later that we
Speaker 3: didn't do it. But we've also all been in a
Speaker 3: situation at some point where we have actually u up
Speaker 3: for somebody or we have taken a step to intervene,
Speaker 3: and you feel and to reflect on how you feel afterwards.
Speaker 3: And even though it is risky, emotionally risky at the time,
Speaker 3: and you do feel uncomfortable sticking your head out, you
Speaker 3: do feel good afterwards. And that's and talking about these
Speaker 3: things and unpacking the feelings is actually one way in
Speaker 3: which we can begin intervening in and giving people the
Speaker 3: skills to actually do this, to reflect on.
Speaker 1: Times stories like that, that would be a good story.
Speaker 1: That's telling school for people to understand that there can
Speaker 1: be consequences from what appeared.
Speaker 2: Or start off is innocent and no one, no one.
Speaker 1: Spake up, but it's hard, like it's hard and invariably,
Speaker 1: and we start off talking about in university, people are
Speaker 1: vulnerable in that environment because you're coming there and you're
Speaker 1: desperate to belong. It's your first day at your new school. Basically,
Speaker 1: that's right.
Speaker 3: And you know, I remember, just you know, talking about
Speaker 3: some of these stories. I remember being sixteen myself and
Speaker 3: being at a house party where there were no parents
Speaker 3: and there was a lot of drinking going on and
Speaker 3: seeing girl very very drunk on the couch and a
Speaker 3: bit of a creepy guy acting a bit too close,
Speaker 3: and I remember looking around thinking where are her friends?
Speaker 3: Why isn't somebody going in? And it never occurred to
Speaker 3: me that I could be that person, because back then,
Speaker 3: you know, there was I firstly, I hadn't had any
Speaker 3: education about ethical bystander behavior It wasn't until I started
Speaker 3: working in this space. And then I remember, like as
Speaker 3: a in my twenties, being in clubs and seeing I
Speaker 3: remember seeing one particular young woman in a club who
Speaker 3: was very drunk standing against a wall and this guy
Speaker 3: clearly she didn't want him around her, and he kept
Speaker 3: going back, and I remember watching this for a second,
Speaker 3: and again I didn't know her, but because I'd had
Speaker 3: this education and I was sort of working in this
Speaker 3: space now, I just walked over to her and very
Speaker 3: casually said, hey, hon, do you know where the bathrooms are?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: Do you want to come with me? And pulling her
Speaker 3: into the bathroom and just being like you, okay, do
Speaker 3: you know that guy? Now? Again took two minutes out
Speaker 3: of my life. Simplest intervention in terms of in terms
Speaker 3: of what it cost me of my night, but may
Speaker 3: have been the difference. And she wasn't comfortable, she wasn't okay,
Speaker 3: And so then I was able to find where her
Speaker 3: friends were and connect her back with her friends. But again,
Speaker 3: like with all of these actions, if we're talking about
Speaker 3: sexual violence prevention or prevention of any kind of negative behavior,
Speaker 3: often it's you know so much of I guess what
Speaker 3: I'm trying to say. So much of our prevention efforts
Speaker 3: are focused on how do we prevent the offender from
Speaker 3: doing the offending, and I think that's very important that
Speaker 3: we have that focus, but we also need to look
Speaker 3: at the role of bystanders and work out how is
Speaker 3: a community do we operate, what values do we hold?
Speaker 3: How do we educate our kids of what to do
Speaker 3: if they're in a situation so that they can step
Speaker 3: up or step in and be that bystander who.
Speaker 1: Well, it's fighting crime one a one, like if the
Speaker 1: victim and you try to prevent all strengthen that when
Speaker 1: banks were robbed, and it's a horrible analogy, but banks
Speaker 1: robbed all the time. Then they got security screens in
Speaker 1: and CCTV footage made it almost impossible to run in
Speaker 1: and rob a bank. You're talking about creating an environment,
Speaker 1: and this is my takeaway on it, through education and
Speaker 1: understanding that helps protect potential victims. Creating an environment that
Speaker 1: it's more difficult to do. That analogy that you used
Speaker 1: in the nightclub, like we've all seen people and you
Speaker 1: walk past and you think, well, it's not really my
Speaker 1: business and that, but if we all looked out for
Speaker 1: each other. Maybe we do make it harder for I
Speaker 1: call them creeps. I can't help. But the people, let's
Speaker 1: call it for what it is, they shit me, the
Speaker 1: ones that take advantage of vulnerable people.
Speaker 3: And yeah, and giving young people the scripts of like
Speaker 3: if in that moment it's too risky for you to
Speaker 3: go and do something or say something, who else in
Speaker 3: the environment can you draw on the bouncer, the bartender
Speaker 3: that you know, Like.
Speaker 1: Well, that's right, because sometimes that it might be a
Speaker 1: personal physical risk. It's stepping in, but you've got people
Speaker 1: there that they're in control.
Speaker 3: And it's also going to be a very different reaction.
Speaker 3: Like if we use that scenario of the girl in
Speaker 3: the bar, it's a very big difference between me walking
Speaker 3: over and new walking over because of gender and how
Speaker 3: that's coded. And you know, for a guy walking over
Speaker 3: to step in could become very adversarial very quickly with
Speaker 3: that guy, whereas a girl it's a woman, it can diffuse.
Speaker 3: So again it's also about thinking how what is the
Speaker 3: best way to diffuse this situation? Who else is available
Speaker 3: in this environment? Is it about going to a bartender
Speaker 3: or a stuff or having a female go and check
Speaker 3: on the female to see issues. Okay, you know there's
Speaker 3: different ways of exploring scenarios, and I think a lot
Speaker 3: of that education that's been done around ethical by standard
Speaker 3: behavior and so on draws on these real life scenarios
Speaker 3: to get people to unpack. You know that there's not
Speaker 3: necessarily one right answer to resolve any of these scenarios,
Speaker 3: but it's about exploring what are the tools available in
Speaker 3: each of these scenarios.
Speaker 1: Well, I think we're going to call part one ethical
Speaker 1: bystander behavior because I think a great message to get
Speaker 1: out there, very good message. Let's take a break now,
Speaker 1: I'll rip my notes up and we'll come back, and
Speaker 1: I'm sure we've got a lot more to talk about.
Speaker 1: But look, I just want to say, Nina, sitting down
Speaker 1: and speaking to you, I'm learning a learning a lot
Speaker 1: about different approaches and how to make a difference. So
Speaker 1: full credit to you on the message in that you're
Speaker 1: getting across.
Speaker 2: Thank you.