Police and rape and dealing with uppity women who complain

The threads advertising the International Women's Day events at both No Right Turn and Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty have turned into debates on what happened at the Wellington protest and the heavy criticism of the police culture of misogyny that the media has portrayed as the main thrust of all the events around the country.

I want to focus for a moment (well probably several moments) on the role of the police, and the broader justice system, in the recent outrage about rape and violence. I've made a few comments around the traps, and on my own post about the Auckland march, and I want to tie them all together and hopefully coherently communicate about this issue.

I write this an activist woman, a leftwing feminist, who has been involved in a lot of protests (compared to your average Kiwi) and organised a fair few. Mostly this was from 1996 - 2000, although I do still attend marches and rallies on issues I care about, when I can. The vast majority of these demonstrations of various kinds were about education issues, although I have been on some organised by women's groups, peace activists and environmental concerns. Almost all of these actions of varying kinds having been in Auckland - out of the City of Sails I've been on an anti-war march in Wellington in 2004 and I was involved in all the protests on the Bus Tour to Wellington taken by Education Action Groups around the country in 1996. So there's a bit of context for you.

Before I became an activist I had had few interactions with the police. I remember as a school girl being at a few parties that the police broke up, being in cars that were breath-tested (and never failed), that kind of thing. My parents have never been burgled, and as a child and teenager I wasn't aware of the police as anything other than a benign force protecting us all, when they weren't annoying us youf by shutting down parties.

This perception changed mightily through my years as a protest organiser and since then, but not just because of the way marches and the like were policed in Auckland.

The policing of protests is always a difficult area. As activists we know that the police exist, in this context, largely to suppress the rights of demonstrators and to manage the way that these events are covered in the media. If there is any conflict, no matter how minor, between police and protesters, regardless of who is to blame, that will become the reported issue as opposed to whatever the protest was actually about. I've seen this happen too many times for it not to be a strategy used by some police. The second question media always ask about a march* is "how many arrests were there?" or some variant of this.

There is an argument that police deal with protests in a way to protect those demonstrating and ensure their rights to free speech are upheld. And sometimes this is true. I organised a march once where the police officer in charge actually asked me, as we reached the end of the march route, if we wanted to go the wrong way up Alfred St. As the march had gone well and there had been no conflict, I asked if we could. He said yep and I got to vicariously tick off one of my minor dreams - to drive a vehicle the wrong way up Alfred St. The next week we had another march and it was a totally different story. Something had changed, and I never worked out what. Violence did ensue and to be honest the march organisers were baffled as to why, beyond an intention by the police to fuck shit up. Of course it was the violence that got the coverage, not the issue.

I could tell you all my protest war stories, but there were two particular incidents that really impacted on my view of the cops. One was a bizarre incident that I still can't fully believe it really happened - I won't go into the detail of it now but let's just say it includes the lines "and then the helicopters swooped out of the sky" and "thankfully they didn't have any female officers or they would have found me hiding out in the KFC toilets." That's a story for another time.

But the tale I want to focus on today speaks strongly of the reason why so many women activists are sceptical of police genuineness about complaints of violence and rape that we might make.

I don't remember what year it was** but I was involved in an Auckland group called Feminist Action. One of the issues we were focusing on at the time was a particularly abhorrent advertising campaign by The Rock radio station, which disgustingly blended sexism and homophobia to promote their breakfast show. We decided to occupy their radio station one afternoon, about ten of us, to show our contempt for their tactics. I was pretty nervous, this was a bit edgy for me, but we marched into their offices and started chanting, after we failed to get in the actual studio door. We had underestimated the sexism of the staff - some of the women were wearing white Jenny Shipley's Not My Sister t-shirts, and the men deliberately doused these women with drinks, in the best tradition of wet t-shirt contests. While there's more to it than this (of course) we were assaulted by these men, despite the fact that we were leaving anyway, and one woman was so badly hurt she ended up on crutches.

Once ejected we went across the road to the police station to complain about the assaults. They went far beyond using reasonable force to remove trespassers. However the way the police dealt with it was revealing. We were split up and interviewed in pairs. I was with the woman whose leg had been badly hurt and she was in a lot of pain. I asked repeatedly for the police to get a doctor, and they kept ignoring me. As a baby law student I was an annoying pain in the arse to them. We didn't understand why the focus of the police was not on the men who had assaulted us but on our protest. We worked it out when they served us all with trespass notices and kicked us out of the station, refusing to take our complaints of assault. I managed to guilt one officer into driving me and the badly hurt woman to the nearest White Cross. He used this opportunity to lecture us on our actions, as if we were children. My friend was too hurt to take it in, I was seething but we needed the lift as she couldn't walk properly so I shut my trap.

What we did may have been illegal, I'm not an expert on trespass law, but what those men in that radio station did to us was definitely against the law. But who did the police choose to pursue?

Since then I have heard many tales of women not being taken seriously by the police when they have complained of rape, abuse and violence (mostly outside of the context of political protest, although Maia can tell the story of a nasty incident in Wellington that was not). Louise Nicholas and the other women who took the recent cases are examples of women who persisted with complaints not just about rape but also about abuses of power by the police. Yes those complaints were historic and yes they applied to particular police officers. But one of the key issues here is why they weren't dealt with at the time, or when the women originally complained. That is an issue of the system, not individual bad eggs.

Yes I think the system has improved. The increase in women police officers has been one of the drivers of change I'm sure. But there is more to be done.

We need a police force, as part of our justice system, that deals sensitively and appropriately with complaints of rape and violence towards women. We need to find a way to resolve the difficulties of the "he says, she says" nature of rape allegations, particularly when the victim is too traumatised to come forward when there is still physical evidence. Who thinks first of protecting all that evidence of violence rather than trying to destroy it, when they can still feel the hands of the rapist on their body, think of the weight of his body on theirs, still notice the pieces of himself he has left behind? I doubt I would have the incredible strength necessary not to scrub myself raw. That would be superhuman, imho. Should we expect more of rape victims than we do of anyone else?

In reference to the protests this week, I think Terence has put it well in his post about the Wellington march:

1. I was marching against the culture of misogyny that still persists in New Zealand. And which provides oxygen for the violence and rape that affects too many New Zealand women's lives.

2. I marched in particular on this day against the manifestations of this misogyny that can be found in our police force.

3. I also was marched to express my outrage against the rapes committed by Shollum and Shipton, and Rickard's repulsive attitudes and abuse of power.

4. And I was marching for changes that lead to a justice system that is more in tune with the needs of rape victims and which, while still offering fair trials to all, makes it easier for the perpetrators of rape to be brought to justice.

jo also reports an interesting conversation she had with a police man at the Otautahi/Christchurch event. It doesn't bode well.

Ultimately I think that many people don't want to believe that the police force is still in part a sexist institution. We can't believe it, because then who is there to turn to when rape happens?

Update, 10th March 6.48pm: And when I wrote the above I didn't even know about this. Shudder.

* The first question is invariably how many people were there. Questions about the actual issue being raised, the arguments being made, are a long way down the priority list. The reporting of protests, imho, is not about exposing and considering the cause of the protest, but about getting pictures that are exciting. Conflict is always creates exciting pictures, and thus always gets coverage. This is one reason why savvy protesters often seek to construct another visual image that the media could use, eg an effigy burning (fire almost always makes it onto the news or into print), people in crazy costumes, everyone wearing the same colour, or some kind of visual symbol of the actual issue like the Debt Monster that student protests have used in recent times or the five red stars laid out by the Auckland kindergarten teachers to indicate the concerns about quality or the creation of a funeral complete with coffin, etc.

** I had ME for three years and it has wiped a lot of the detail from my memories pre-2004, sadly. I think this particular event happened in 2000.