Sexual assault is about authority and control. Now, award winning journalist Nina Funnell is helping survivors regain their power. After surviving her own horrifying attack, Nina has worked with dozens of victims to blow the whistle on some of the worst offenders in the country. From vile initiation rituals and misogynistic slogans to learning what sexual assault looks like, the campaigner is lifting the lid on rape culture.
TRIGGER WARNING: This episode of I Catch Killers discusses suicidal ideation. If this raises any issues or concerns, you can reach out to Lifeline on 13 11 14, or text 0477 13 11 14.
Find out more about the Justice Shouldn’t Hurt Take The Stand campaign here.
Discover the Red Zone Report here.
Learn more about the Justice Shouldn't Hurt: Take The Stand fundraiser here and the petition here.
The public has had a long held fascination with detectives. Detective sy a side of life the average person is never exposed her. I spent thirty four years as a cop. For twenty five of those years, I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes in the contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. Welcome to another episode of I Catch Killers. Today's guest, Nina Fanell, is a passionate advocate for sexual assault awareness, prevention, and survivor's rights. Now we all know this is a difficult subject to talk about, but I think discussion needs to be had. Nina has become a prominent voice across the country, starting conversations about consent and sexual violence. Through her advocacy, she aims to educate the public, challenge harmful societal norms, and push for systemic changes that support survivors and hold perpetrators accountable. It's important work that Nina does and I'm looking forward to sitting down with her today and having a chat, finding out who she is, and we're also going to discuss her own experience as a survivor of a violent sexual assault, an experience that has driven her to make a difference in society. Nina is also an award winning journalist and I've got to say, a very impressive person. I think today's conversation is going to be very informative. So let's get into it. Nina Fan, Now, welcome to I Catch Killers. Hello, how are you?
Yeah? Pretty good.
Hot day where we're in the luxury of air conditioned studio, but it was very hot outside. Your name keeps coming up to me with people. Have you spoken to Nina? Have you spoken to Nina? So this sit down has been a long long time coming. You have a bit of a reputation, do I? And now is that ever good?
Or yeah? Well, it's interesting because your name keeps coming up to me as well, so I think it's yeah.
I deny that allegation. Well, we mentioned when before we started here, Claire Harvey, and that's a person who was mentored me when my early stages in striking into the media. And you've worked with Claire as well.
I have, and Claire she's been phenomenal. She's been a really good support as well as editor and mentor.
Yeah, what Claire taught me a lot about the integrity. I admired her integrity, about the importance of getting the truth out and stories. And she was fearless too.
And funny. She's actually, she's one of the funniest people I've met.
I was trying to say she was professional, but she's very funny. She's a good lady, good lady allround. Your background, first of all your personal life, as in your where you grew up.
Who's Nina? Tell us a little bit about Nina.
Okay, So I grew up in Sydney, lived here, studied here until my twenties, and then pursued a career in journalism.
And what were you studying at UNI?
So I studied meta in communications. I'd always wanted to be a journalist. At high school, I'd been editor of the school newspaper, and you know that was my goal. Either that or law, and it was sort of a flip of a coin in the end, but I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in journalism, so off I went studied that, and then I, through a series of events, decided that I would specialize in reporting on sexual violence. That was an area that I wanted to dedicate my time to.
Okay, it seems like a prerequisite for people that get into the media or journalists. They head up the school school paper or have some involvement, So it's got to be a passion, hasn't it.
Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, I guess. I guess I've always been interested in people and people's stories and where they're coming from. This is this is quite unusual for me to be on this side, usually in your seat, and I'm the one who's asking people about their lives, so I'm not I'm not so used to talking about my life, but I've always been curious about what drives people and what their objectives are and sharing their stories.
Okay, your professional career and well, I've got a list of things here that I don't want to embarrass you. But your Walkley Award winning journalists yep, and what was that in relation.
To I've won a couple. So so I did. A couple of years ago I started the Let Her Speak campaign, which was to reform sexual assault victim gag laws around the country. So I'd met a young woman called Grace tame Well. Actually at the time, what I was doing is I was reporting on sexual assault within universities, and I was trying to do fifty two articles in fifty two weeks about university campus rape. I had ended up teaching in the media department at Sydney University, and because I'd gone public as a survivor myself, a number of my students had recognized me, and so if they had their own stories, they saw me, I guess, as a safe person that they could come and disclose to. So I was receiving quite a number of disclosures of sexual violence, particularly within the residential colleges at Sydney University. And so when I became a journalist, I decided that I would One of the projects I'd always wanted to do was a seer. He's focusing on sexual assault within universities and colleges, and so it was in that year that I got a tip off about this guy a convicted sex offender called Nicholas best who now most Australians would know of as the person who had groomed and assaulted Grace Tame. And at the time, Nicholas Bester was down at the University of Tasmania studying his PhD and living on campus in a residential college with in a co educational residential college with you know, he was in his sixties and he was living alongside eighteen year olds and with shared bathroom facilities and so on. It was very creepy. And so the students at UTAZ were saying, can you report on this guy who's who's who's on our campus and who's making a number of students feel very uncomfortable, And so I said, yeah, you know, I'd be happy to look at the story, but I'd want to know what his original victim feel about this, and is she comfortable with the story being told in the media and so on, And so I tracked her down and at the time, Grace was living in la and so at first I was just really feeling out whether she'd be comfortable with me running this story about Besta living on campus, and she then indicated that she would actually like to comment and to tell her story as well, and so I thought, great, sure, so I ran it past our lawyers at News dot com dot au and they said, well, you can run the story, but you just can't name the victim survivor. And I was quite perplex Why not. She's over eighteen, now, she's given consent, there's no defamation issues, you know, all the things that we would usually go through and tick off. And they, Gina McWilliams, the lawyer, said well, there's this thing in TASMANI called Section one nine four K of the Evidence Act, which prohibits sexual assault survivors from being able to self identify the media unless they go to court and seek a court order from a judge. And I was absolutely perplexed. I've never heard anything like this because most of the reporting that I've done has been New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, et cetera. So, to cut a long story short, we went back to Grace and said would she like us to obtain her a court order so that she can self identify? And she said yes. And the more I sort of began to dig in with our lawyers, I realized it was costing about ten thousand dollars, and I thought, well, what would she do if she didn't have a news organization willing to do that work? What would she do if she just wanted to write her own Facebook post or an autobiography? Would she actually have to wear this cost? And the answer was yes. And for me as a survivor myself, I'd gone public when I was twenty three years old in New South Wales and that had been a very cathartic and healing thing for me to be able to do. So to realize that there was an entire jurisdiction, and it turns out not just one. Both the Northern Territory and Tasmania had these laws where no sexual assault survivor regardless. It wasn't just child sexual salt survivors, it was any survivors. They couldn't tell their story without having to go jump through this hope and seeking a court order. So I pitched the idea of a campaign to my editors at news dot com dot a you could let her speak. At first, it was just going to be about Grace, and in the end, of course, once we got Grace's court order, I then got flooded with other survivors who said I didn't realize I'm living in Tasmania or I'm living in the Northern Territory and I want to tell my story too. So I set up a go fund me and raised a couple of one hundred thousand dollars and engaged Mark lawyers to progressively obtain these court orders. And then what I would do is each time we'd get a court order for one of the survivors, I would then break their story going public and we would then use that as an opportunity to once again highlight the punitive impacts of the laws. And so I ran that campaign for three years and in twenty twenty the various gag laws around Australia were all reformed. So that was.
That was.
One of the reasons why I got the WALKLEYFF for Women's leadership and for public service journalism.
Okay, well, full credit to you, because if you can do something in the media, in journalism that makes a difference, makes a difference to people's lives. With that campaign, how many people came out that were called up in that legislation that they couldn't couldn't speak out.
So in the end we ended up making twenty two applications for court orders. One of the crazy things that happened was just after Tasmania had reformed their legislation, I got a phone call from another journalist called Scherrell Moody to say that Victoria had just introduced a gag law. They'd gone backwards. And what was remarkable about that was when I was running the campaign in Tasmania and the Northern Territory, no one was defending the law. These were old laws that were still on the books. They'd been introduced at a time when no one had actually conceived of something like the Me Too movement. No one had preempted that survivors would ever want to be attached to their stories, into their names, having their names attached to their stories. So the laws had been introduced with the idea that they were actually protecting victim survivors from exploitative media who might try to harass or pressure people into revealing their name exactly. So when we began the campaign in Tasmania and the NT, there were no natural defenders of the legislation. People pretty quickly realized, yeah, this is outdated and it's time for reform. Victoria was a very, very different fight because the legislation was liberately introduced in early twenty twenty. And the other thing that made it very fact is it made that a very different fight. Was firstly, Victoria has a very long and proud history of victim survivors doing advocacy. If you look at things like the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, a lot of that was driven out of Ballarat by survivors who waived their right to anonymity. So we already had a very vocal group of survivor advocates down in Victoria, and then all of a sudden in twenty twenty, the Victorian government introduces this legislation that overnight puts these people back in the closet and tells them you can't continue your advocacy, you can't be named anymore. And some of those people had their books out, they had autobiographies, and overnight those books were in contempt of court. So it was it was extremely different because it wasn't just survivors had to fight for their rights. It was survivors who had already exercised their to be public overnight was suddenly.
Gagged and have to justify themselves.
Yeah, and so that was very, very traumatic for them, and it also meant that the government when we initially launched the campaign and were contacting them about the laws, they were very defensive and they dug their heels in and it took quite a lot of persuasion for them to eventually agree to overturn the laws. And when I was going through there was one particular survivor, Jamie Lee in Victoria. She her cases. It was a terrible case. She was sexually abused by her biological father and so was her older stepsister, and her older stepsister reported the father to police, and before it got to trial, the father murdered the stepsister so to shut her up so she couldn't give evidence. So the father then went to jail for murder, and as he was approaching the release date, Jamie realized he actually he doesn't have any sexual offenses convicted because he only went to jail for the murder. So Jamie decided, as an adult that she would then give evidence so that he would be he would become a registered sex offender, which then of course has different implications exactly. So Jamie had just gone to court as an adult to have her father reconvicted this time as a sex offender, and was successful in doing that, and her entire goal in doing that was so that she could then publicize his name and warn people about who he was and what he had really done. And so while she was successful in the court case and he was convicted of the sex offenses, when the gag law was introduced, it meant that Jamie couldn't be named. And one of the perverse outcomes of that was neither could her father because they share a surname. So all of a sudden, her entire purpose of going to court, And keep in mind, this was back during code, so it was a very different you know, there were not a lot of supports, it was a very different climate. So Jamie had gone through this horrendous, horrendous series of events, and when we went to fight for her right to get a court order, we were then told that not only would we have to fight for her right to name herself, we would also have to apply for a court order to name her deceased sister. Because at the same time that the government had the Victorian government had introduced the legislation gagging living sexual assault victims, they'd also introduced legislation that made it a criminal offense for journalists to name any deceased sexual assault victims.
Can I ask what was made evading Victorian government, because it seems to be like swimming against the tide. What evated them in twenty twenty to reintroduce that legislation.
We still don't know. And we've been through handside and everything at the time, and there wasn't a very clear justification for the introduction of that legislation. It was a massive cock up basically, and that.
Call me suspicious, but I'm wondering why that was being driven yeah, boor then.
You know, the only group that was actually being protected by that were offenders. But we still don't have a clear answer from government. In the end, they did so one of the things that happened was because they also introduced this gag on deceased victim so overnight it became a criminal offense to name Jill mar or Eurydice Dixon or any of those, and a lot of their parents came out saying, what do you mean I can't remember my child? You know. So when we made the applications with Jamie, we actually kept getting knocked back by the court. The prosecution were actually fighting it too. They were actually arguing that they didn't think Jamie should be able to name her deceased sister. In the end, we were victorious, but it was a really it was a very very different fight and a very difficult fight in Victoria and the survivors who participated in By that time, I'd rebranded the campaign from let Her Speak to let Us Speak, and we also had male survivors join, so there were five male survivors who we did their legal work for, and so in time the legislation was reformed. So by then I'd obviously pivoted away from reporting just on university sexual assault and was now reporting more widely on sexual assault. And as I began to listen to people's stories, I realized that there was a much bigger story to tell about the criminal justice system and how it impacts on sexual assault survivors. So the campaign I'm doing now, which is called Justice Shouldn't Hurt. I've been following twenty survivors through their journeys with criminal justice since about twenty twenty one, and you know, stepping through that process with them and watching all the things unfold, which has been an incredible by Yeah, yeah.
I want to break that down and get into that before we moved past the University of Culture. There I would imagine you taking a stand on it. How old were you at the time when you were at UNI?
So I started UNI at age eighteen, okay, and then I began I got a job in the department when I was twenty three, So I started working there as a very junior.
So what so that type of campaign in the university environment, living on campus and all that. First firstly, why did you decide to target that and focus on that particular issue? But what was the culture of Was it almost like UNIQ kids buring unique kids?
And yeah, it's is that I'm trying to get a sense.
So sure, because I wouldn't imagine it didn't make you the most popular person on campus.
People would have gone what she on about?
Because you're trying to change a culture thinking. So I was.
So I attended Sidney UNI. So, as I mentioned it, So at age twenty three, I was sexually assaulted while I was in my honors year and I went public and so then because of that, I then got a job as a tutor in the media department. And I think because I was only a few years older than my students. They saw me as someone Yeah. So in two thousand and eight I had a student disclosed to me that she'd been very brutally raped by Saint Paul's student. And the following year I'd started my PhD. And she recontacted me and she told me his name and so on. She recontacted in two thousand and nine she said, have a look at this, and it was a Saint Paul's Facebook group called defined Statutory pro Rape Anti Consent, and the image for the Facebook group was a T shirt that says does this shirt make me look like a rapist? And all of the members of the group was Saint Paul's students. And I asked my student, what would you like to do with this, and she said, I want to take it to the media because we've tried to address the problems. At the time at the college, there were all kinds of things like above the bar at Saint Paul's they had a thing that says she can't say no with a cock in her mouth. There were chalkings on the pavements around some of the other colleges with things like naked women saying every hole is the goal? Just really crass, rape culture type of things. This was a sort of tone of the time. So she took the story and it was front page news about this Facebook group, and this was one of the things that really shocked me. What happened next was the people that came out to defend and line up and excuse that Facebook group were some very senior, powerful individuals. So in twenty eighteen, I ended up writing a report called the Red Zone Report. We call Orientation Week or O week the Red Zone because one in eight of all rapes or sexual assaults will happen on campus will happen in that one week. So sexual assault services like the New South Wales Rape Crisis Center receive a spike in phone calls immediately during and then following Orientation Week on campus. When I wrote the Red Zone Report, one of the saddest stories that I heard was about what actually happens to students in the colleges when they blow the whistle. You said before, you didn't think, you know, you thought I wouldn't be very popular on campus. I was fine because I was a staff member. I didn't live in any of the colleges. I would go back to my home every night. But these students of mine who did live on campus, the stories that they would tell me. And you know, if people read the red Zone report, there's one one particular story of one student who blew the whistle on what was happening in the Sydney University colleges. And she would walk into after she did that, she would walk into the dining hall and sit down at one of those long trestle tables that they have, and everybody else at the dining table would stand up, turn their backs on her and walk away. It was the worst, the absolute worst part of this, and a trigger warning obviously, but the worst part of this was so at college. One of the things that they do is they take photos of each other and they put them they decorate their bedroom doors in the hallways. And she said, after she'd written some articles and she was studying media as well, and she had exposed what was happening in the colleges, she said, every Monday she would come back and just one photo would be pulled down off her door. And she didn't know who was doing this or what their motivation was, but she knew that it was a psychological dig at her and a sign that people didn't want her there, and she said every week, every week one would be pulled down, one would be pulled down, until the final week she came there was only one photo left, and she pulled it down herself, and she went inside her room and she cut her wrists and she survived. But you hear those stories, and these are young.
People, these are vulnerable people.
Yeah, and and incredibly you know here incredibly bright individuals, people with bright futures, and they leave these places scarred because of what's happening. So, I mean, in the Red Zone report, I actually myself and annahush and Shanna Bremner who co authored the report with me, we went back through about one hundred years of media reports into sexual assaults and hazing at the colleges, and we drew this massive timeline going back to the thirties showing that this had been the sort of sorts of hazing that was going on. And hazing can be anything from you know, initiation rituals of getting people to eat sheep's hearts or drinking goldfish were some of the things that we found through to very violent sexual assaults. And so because I'd been a staff member and because I'd started to hear these stories, and because I had seen the impact that that had had on my student when she'd ventilated and exposed the Saint Paul's pro rape Facebook group. The fact that it wasn't just the institution that defended itself, the fact that other people came out of the woodwork to stand up behind this Facebook group and to defend the college. That was what shocked me the most. And I remember thinking, my God, what hope does she have? So that was what inspired me, I guess to do that before two.
I've got to say there and they're just telling that story that gave a real good insight into the type of thing that goes on there and the culture. What you just explained there, I don't see how a reasonable person this is not just tom foolery, this is not just you know, kids mucking around on the camp has been a little bit wild in the UNI days.
It's disgraceful.
It was the the stories that are in the Red Zone report are still to this day some of the most shocking things that I have have reported on. And I've reported on gang rapes, I've reported on murders, but but I think the tone of some of what was going on, I mean thankfully there are. You know, cultural change is a really difficult thing and it will take it is, but but you have to start somewhere, and I think that certainly the conversation is beginning to change the It's interesting actually that that report, red Zone. It's been back in the news again this year because the student does at Sydney University have recently been elected and the incoming women's offices handed out copies of the Red Zone report and a whole group of male students college students decided to rip it up, chanting we don't care, we don't care, and.
Yeah I heard about that, Yeah I didn't fully appreciate the significance of it.
Well, one of the things that was in that report was that the report, it's a two hundred page report, and it differs from any other report in that I actually named names in there. So we had a good legal team on that.
A lot of time spent with the solicitors.
So we named names, and I also interviewed survivors as well as the Kelly family. And if people aren't familiar with the Kelly family, they lost one son to a one punch kill, one punch attack in King's Cross.
Our listeners.
Just to clarify, we've had them on the podcast, right right, I'm sure they're famili with them.
So and then their second son, Stuart, had been at Saint Paul's for one night and never slept in his bed, and the following day when his parents he called his parents desperate to be picked up, and they picked him up and he was at the hospital and he said, I'm never going back to that place.
Something traumaticly clearly happened.
And they've I'm in regular contact with them. I've been in contact with the family this week, and they believe he was sexually assaulted in haste. His story was told in the Red Zone report. I'd interviewed his parents and there was you know, there's pictures of Stewart in the report. And so when you have a group of students now tearing up pages saying we don't care, we don't care. These aren't this isn't a report with anonymous quotes. There are photos of these families and these students like the one who I mentioned before, who who who would sit at the dining table and everybody would leave. She's named and photographed in that report. So when you have students ripping it up saying we don't.
Care it.
Is and it's you know, as I said, when that happened, I said, look, that's not a slap in the face to me as the author. It's a slap in the face to the students and the families who have lost loved one. That There's also been a case at Sydney UNI where back in the seventies a young woman was raped and murdered on Saint Paul's campus on the oval there and that's never been solved. That was in the report. There was also back in the seventies. You know, one of the things I found really interesting when I was building the timeline was we found examples got like in the seventies there was a case an alleged gang rape at Saint Paul's and that year after the gang rape, they gave trophies for the quote Animal Act of the Year to the men who had allegedly committed the gang rape. So these are the kinds of stories that are in that report. So yeah, have to have students tearing it up saying we don't care, it's it shows that there's work to be done. Still, obviously.
That's fairly obvious. Where can people get the red report.
Can the zone it Google it downloaded, Okay.
Invite people to have a listen and get a deeper understanding. But what you've told me there, and I think I could be put in the basket of other people. You hear what goes on and the shenanigans that go on at UNI. But when you break it down there there that's violent, criminal behavior, that's.
And there have been deaths, multiple deaths. There's also been deaths because of alcohol.
Lives have been destroyed. Yeah, and then then to make the culture that anyone that stands up or has been a victim in that situation to then be ostracized in such a cruel way like taking the photo down.
Yeah, it's and I think one of the things that's really I mean, I find the psychology hazing really interesting to try to understand and unpack what's going on in these cultures. And I think, you know, one thing that's for me that I learned when I was doing that research was when you have eighteen year olds who are just graduating from high school and their lives are going through a whole lot of transitions. So it's not just the transition from high school to university it's also their transition of going from seventeen to eighteen and being able to legally drink for the first time. It's also the first time they're moving out of home. So for a variety of reasons they're going into these environments. And of course, as human beings, we all have a need to belong. And when you've got a lot of transition and you're looking around trying to establish, well, what are the rules of this place, whose top dog, how do I fit in? How do I get on here? And then on day one, week one of orientation Week or they now call it welcome Week, someone says all you have to do is, you know, participate in this drinking game or you know, do this and what are often quite lighthearted to start off with initiation rituals, like one of them at the time, back in the day used to be carrying two bricks around campus all week. Annoying, yep. But if that's what you do and then you get instant membership, instant love, instant family, that's incredibly seductive. That's incredibly enticing when you're that age and you're desperate to belong, And so what would happen is that you would have normal reasonable eighteen year olds, seventeen year olds, eighteen year olds who go to these places for the first time, and within a very short period of time, their normal morals and their normal standards of behavior can be very quickly replaced. And at first it feels good.
It feels good as you identified the psychology of everyone wanting to belong and you're at a vulnerable stage at that age, insecure or you've got your freedom, and if.
The price of membership at first is you know, a hazing ritual that you know, for most people who go through college, you know, the majority won't they obviously they're not going to die, they're not going to be raped. For most people, the hazing ritual may be something that they look back on in twenty years and think, God, that was a bit silly, but at the time it was fun. And also, as human beings, we bond through shared adversity. So when you've got a group of first years or they call them freshers, and they're all having to you know, drink till they vomit or whatever it is, the next day, after you've participated in that group bonding activity, you actually feel solidarity with the other people that went through that with you. So because I mean, if you look at the army, or if you look.
At I was thinking, like tactical policing, they break you all down, your share the pain, and they punish you and then your.
Mates for life.
Absolutely, and that's part of it's human nature, isn't the psychology of it?
It is, so I can understand why then those individuals who have gone through those shared bonding, shared adversity experiences then do firstly feel very connected to each other, but also why then when you have an outsider like a journalist criticizing that culture, they become very very defensive. So they develop we call it a siege mentality where if anything, they sort of they bunk it down. You are painted as the outsider and the enemy, and so that can actually at times, that can It's sort of it's a paradox as a journalist because on the one hand, you want to shine a light and document what's happening in the culture in order to demonstrate the need for cultural change. But at the same time, I'm conscious that every time I write these articles or I produce something like the Red Zone Report, there is a risk that you then further entrench that culture.
You're pushing against them, and so they bunk it down and come back harder or more resilient in the world.
Well, or they changed their tactics. So one of the things that happened in twenty fourteen was their Wesley College at Sydney University had produced this magazine called the RAQWB where they were documenting all of the students who had hooked up with each other. And it was this sort of slut shaming document and that was exposed by some of the students who were whistleblowers. These whistleblowers at Wesley College had exposed what was happening, and the response, well, one of the responses to that was to then not change the culture, just ban mobile phones at parties and you know, getting people to in other words, becoming more secretive, becoming.
More in solid closed doors exactly.
And so we know that when these stories do in the media and there is for a brief moment a spotlight, the reaction tends to be from within the culture tends to be highly defensive and then to become more secretive, more insular, to implement more I guess protections around to try to sort of shield out the media and to blame the media. And I remember like, actually, you know, you asked me at the beginning, who am I and where did I come from? So when I was in year twelve, you know, back being being editor of one of the editors of the school newspaper, I went to a school called PLC Croyden and one of our schools, the schools in the area, called Trinity Grammar, was on the front page of the Daily Telegraph. There was a big news story that came out where a number of the boarders in the boarding house had been held down in sexually assaulted and there was an implement that was made in woodwork class that they called the anaconda, and they were using this to rape the boys, the older boarders. And I remember when that story broke so distinctly because a lot of us girls, you know, we used to do debates against Trinity Grammar. A lot of us if we had brothers, our brothers went to Trinity Grammar.
You've had an affiliation with the school.
Yeah, we had social dances together, if we had boyfriends, they might go to Trinity Grammar, that kind of thing. So when that story broke, it didn't just impact their school, it impacted our school, and a lot of the boarders in our boarding house had brothers in that boarding house. And I remember walking into the year twelve common room having read the story and having been utterly disgusted and horrified, And one of the first things that I heard in our common room was, Oh, it's just a media beat up. Oh, the media is these people who are writing these stories are just jealous that they can't afford to go to schools like ours.
And it's a wrong response to this.
Yeah, And then hearing the same sort of attitudes by the parents at school pickup of oh, it's just boys being boys, you know, all of these attitudes which minimize, downplay, shift, responsibility, cover up. And I remember at the time as a you know, I would have been about seventeen at this point, being horrified by the violence, but also horrified by the attitudes that were unfolding around me. And unfortunately, what happened in that case was the school, Trinity Grammar, engaged a crisis comms manager and that person who and I know this person, that person their job was to spin the story in the media. Now, this was a case of game rape, and numerous numerous attacks had happened. The boys responsible were charged with sexual assaults. But what this common specialist did was instead of talking about instead of using the term sexual assault, he started using the word bullying. There's a bullying problem in our boarding houses. And so the conversation very quickly moved away from gang rape. And you can actually go back and look at all the headlines at the time. And after six months, by the time the case finally went to trial, the media went referring to it as sexual assault anymore. They were referring to it as bullying. And of course bullying is a much more sanitized term. And of course the moment you change the goalposts and we're no longer talking about sexual violence, we're now talking about a culture of bullying. The school then decided that they would call themselves a victim of bullying by the big bad media, and so and the principle at the time put out this horrendous newsletter saying that the school's being bullying. And so this whole victim mentality sits in of where the culture becomes defensive, hyper defensive. But also they other the attacker as being the media, that the media are the ones at fault. We're the poor victims here where being bullied. This is a bullying problem that we alves are the bullying victims. And you know, one of the things that I've always said is that had that I mean, the media comms crisis guy did an extraordinary job. I think had that been managed differently, that Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that we got up in twenty eighteen, I was at school. This was back in two thousand. We could have had that Royal commission eighteen years earlier, had that conversation played out differently in the media. And this is what this is also what got me really interested about, well, what is the media's role in these moments? How what is the role of the media to shape and direct the conversation towards different ends? And in that moment, the media missed a pivotal opportunity to talk about sexual assault in these institutions.
I look at that and it always amazes me where they talk about that was bullying and it's boys being boys.
It was clearly sexual assault.
You can't dress it up any other way, but it gets lost in the narrative and the telling and what that media consultant did, Yes he spun it, but the public. And when I say the public, I'm not saying everyone out there, but I know there would be a narrative within the public too. It's boys being boys. That's not boys being boys. It's sexual assault, violent sexual assault.
And how do they hide behind that type of commentary?
And I think I mean that sort of language, which part of it is a language issue about minimizing and reframing and so on and justifying. I think also the fact that the victims were male. And you know, keep in mind, so this is more than two decades ago now this as I said, it was about two thousand that this happened. Thankfully, I think we've come a long way nowadays with understanding that sexual violence impacts boys too, but particularly back then, that was very much erased from the conversation. It was like we didn't have the appropriate frameworks or language to properly discuss sexual violence a targeting boys.
Would I take it further?
Would you also think back when we're going back two decades, it's almost too confronting that boys at this, yeah, highly reputable school are involved in homosexual rates. Yeah, that's the word that they want to bring in that they're not homosexual, they're just being boys being boys. That's really the discussion, isn't it.
So you're absolutely right there is a homophobia. Yeah, in playing into this as well, Yeah, without doubt in a past life again sort of jumping around the.
We've got to jump because we're having this conversation.
I'm thinking the conversation we're having now would be remarkably different from twenty years ago to where we are now.
But thank god we've evolved.
Well, yeah, the thing I was going to say was I was also part of a team that was led by Professor Catherine Lumbee who the team was responsible for doing research into NRL footy players and then developing educational frameworks to address their attitudes towards violence against women and consent. And when Professor Lumbee was doing the research, one of the do you want me to tell me the story of Okay, so what had happened?
I'm from the notes out here in the Yeah, ch I'm fascinated by what you're saying.
So this was back in around two thousand and four, I believe it was. There was a very famous incident involving the Bulldogs and allegations of a rape.
Up at Coffs Harbor I remember it.
And at the time, the CEO was a guy called David Gallup and he contacted Professor Catherine Lumby and said, so she was my supervisor and mentor, and he said what do we do? And she essentially said, well, are you asking me as a media expert because you want a crisis comms plan? Or are you asking me as a gender expert because you want help? And he made it very clear that they had a problem and they needed help with the culture. And so Catherine Lumby's response was, well, the first thing is that you can't just roll out some pre existing off the shelf education program because you've got a very unique culture and you're going to have to develop something tailored from the ground up. So Catherine said, the first thing that we need to do is actually do the research and take the temperature of the culture and get a snapshot of what's going on. And part of that research, there were a whole bunch of people that did that research. Part of what they did was they asked players, player managers, women who had interactions with the clubs, etc. About their experiences. And you don't ask people have you ever raped somebody? Because most people who have committed sexual violence. A, they're not going to admit it, but B most of the time they don't actually realize that that's what they're doing. They don't classify it necessarily as rape. So they asked them to tell us about a night that turned pear shaped, what does that look? And from that they got some really rich data around what was happening back then, and they found there were some very interesting findings. One of them was that individuals who would express horror at the concept of rape, who would then go on to admit to having done something that met the legal definition of rape, like having I'm using quotations, having sex with a pasted out woman. But they also found that there were individuals who were in the code who were horrified by what was going on but didn't have the skill sets or the language to speak up. And I'll never forget there was one story that has always stuck with me of and I'll do identify it. But if you can imagine an eighteen year old kid who's from a country town, who's never been to the big smoke, and he's plucked out of that country town and he's put into an A grade team and they're at an away game, because that's where many of the unethical things would happen because you don't have the usual handbrakes in place. There's a woman involved, and there's a team involved, and there's a lot of alcohol involved, and he sitting there looking down into his beer, thinking what's happening right now is not okay? How does he speak up in that moment? And that's not to excuse not speaking up, but it's to realize that within any of these environments, there's often more than one victim, and there are people who walk out of that very very scarred, who wish they had the skills to be able to intervene, and they're what I consider the sleeper cells. How do we access these people who actually did I remember someone once told me she called it the five percent dickhead rule, which is in any culture, in any community, in any organization, in any company, there are going to be five percent of people who are just flat out of dickheads. They're always born dickheads. They're going to stay do.
I think that's a pretty good rule.
And there's also the opposite five percent of people who are very very ethical, strongly minded individuals. And the challenge is the ninety percent in the middle, and who are they being laid by. Is it the bottom five percent who are setting the tone or is it the top five percent? And one of the challenges with the NRL at the time was a lot of the culture was being set by some of the bottom five percent. So how do you find firstly, how do you identify that top five percent who are actually in there, but they're quiet and they're disempowered. How do you find them? How do you equip them with the skills to become leaders and get them to actually shift the tone of the culture. The other thing that the research I'm just remembering the research found back then was that there were also a whole lot of behaviors that were going on that weren't technically criminal, but they were certainly unethical. So I'll give you an example, having sex, having consensual sex with a woman. Everything's fine, everything's consensual, orgasms all around, everybody's happy, and then five minutes after it's over, saying fuck off your slag and throwing clothes at her. Is it criminal?
It does cross the line of criminal, but there's an ethical and.
Moral absolutely, And so as a result of that, one of the things that became very apparent was that it's not just it's not enough just to educate people about the laws around consent, because the laws AT's a very very base.
Because I go as far to say that in the scenario you put there, if someone's prepared to do that, I think it's a very fine line between then sexually abusing someone.
Absolutely.
Yeah, their moral compass is way off.
Skill absolutely, which is why the work that was being done back then with the NRL that there was a very very strong emphasis on it's not enough just to teach laws. You have to have that ethical component and you have to have that ethical framework otherwise you do get these sorts.
Of It makes a lot of sense in what you're saying, how do you get these people you said, skills? My word was going to come out courage, because I think I might be that articulate, but if I've got the courage to do something, I'll make it clear. But it takes people with the backbone to stand up and say things like that. Yeah.
And it's really interesting because there is a lot of research around and why do bystanders in these situations either take action or not take action? And what the research shows is that in order for someone to be what's good an ethical bystanderd to actually take action, There's a whole sort of things that have to be in place first. So they have to recognize the problem as a problem. They have to because not you know, sometimes people don't know what it is that they're looking at. They have to interpret it as a problem. They also have to feel sufficiently personally responsible, because often people will look around and think, well, why is it my job to like, you know, they're waiting for somebody else to take charge. And they also have to feel that they have sufficient personal power and social power that if they do speak up it's not going to backfire on them, that they're not going to socially embarrass themselves or lose face in that moment. And one of the things that I remember looking at some research that came out of the US about this idea of ethical bystander behavior and how do you promote it. There was a group that was actually they were actually looking at the issue of bullying in schools, and they went into a school and they did a survey to find out how many of the students used bullying type behaviors or had say pro bulling attitude. So they excused bulling behavior, and they found that one in five students had was using bullying tactics or was enabling bullying. And so the researchers went back to the school and they did a school presentation and assembly and they didn't say to the students one in five of you are bullies or one in five of you you know a little shit. They did the opposite. They said, four in five of you are not bullies. Well done, give yourselves a pat on the back.
That's great.
And this is what we call positive social norm theory, where what you're trying to do is you're trying to reinforce the dominant positive behavior as the social norm. Because what that does is if you're sitting in that assembly hall and you're one of the five who is a bully, you suddenly realize you're actually in the minority.
The two people are that would make you feel uncomfortable for all of a sudden, thinking you've got the power, it's been taken away with you, absolutely taken away from you us, you'd say, and.
You're in the minority where and you know, we're social animals, were herd animals. We want to know the safety empower in numbers. But it also lets those four in five people know, hey, if you do speak up when you see something, you know, if it's a racist comment or a sexist comment or whatever it is, or a homophobic comment, if you speak up, four in five of the people around you are actually really relieved that you did that and actually supportive of you doing that. And so what they found after they presented the research was that they they they went away, and then they came back and they they did the research again with the school, and they found that just by having done that one intervention of presenting that research in that way to the students, the rates of bulling dropped further. And when they went back, they found that ninety percent of students now didn't engage in bulling behavior. And we're not supportive of bulling behavior. So there's some really interesting ramifications for this sort of research because often if you look at how we talk about, say, sexual violence in Australia, and I know yesterday you mentioned to me about, you know, rape myths and so on, and one of the things that I've been really interested in is okay, so if you look at how we talk about things, we might see a statistic that says one in five I think it is young Australians believe that if a woman was drunk when sexually assaulted, that she was in she was part way responsible for the sexual violence. Okay, we should actually be reframing that statistic in the reverse, we should actually be saying four in five young Australians do not believe that a person who is drunk is responsible if they experience sexual violence, because what that does is it reaffirms the positive and we know, again from research like with juries, there's this paradox that every time you mention a rape myth in order to critique it ironically, you actually end up reaffirming and reinforcing that rape myth because that's what people remember. So we need to really quite radically change our approach to how we discuss rape myths and sexual violence. So in you know, some of the reporting that I'm doing, I try to focus on the positive social norm of what people you know, the fact that the majority of Australians don't think that someone who is drunk is responsible if they're experiencing sexual violence, and keep normalizing that as this is what most people believe, because it calls out those who then hold that minority viewpoint rather than reinforcing the minority viewpoint. But of course one of the challenges as a journalist is that we know that, you know, we focus on the shocking statistics, the shock factor.
How do you get there the cross Yeah, But I find it fascinating what you're saying and just whinding it back to the school situation all of a sudden, that's you've ostracized the bully. Yeah, by just changing the terminology and the way it's approached. Yeah.
And there was there was a case in Steubenville in the US where so that's a little country town and there was a football team who were the pride and joy of this town, the school, the high school football team, and there was a party one night and following a game, and at the first part of the party, the players were getting quite drunk. What happened was the party then moved on and at the second location there was a girl who was passed out in the basement and she was sexually assaulted and that was filmed on camera, and then that went viral on the internet, and a group called Anonymous then sort of went and tracked down the individuals responsible and so on, and it blew up into this massive, massive front page court case that went international. But there was one individual there that night who I've become I was quite interested in, a guy called Evan Westlake. Now he was not one of the perpetrators and he wasn't one of the victims. Earlier on in the night, when they'd been at the first party and everybody was drinking, he saw one of his mates get very very drunk and go to get his car keys to drive home, and in that moment, Evan Westlake stepped in, took his mate's car keys off him, told him not to drive, and got his mate home safely. So, you know, ten out of ten ethical bystander behavior. Great work. Later on in the night, at the second house party, Evan Westlake actually walked in on the sexual assault of the unconscious girl in progress. And when he walked in, he said, night boys, I'm heading.
Off, and he left, didn't address it.
And later when he was at the trial, they asked him. He actually gave evidence for the victims to support the victims, and they asked him, why didn't you say something? Why didn't you why didn't you speak up? Why didn't you do something in that moment? And he said because I didn't know that's what rape looked like. And what I find really interesting about that example is that this is, you know, he thought rape was someone who jumps out from behind the bushes.
Wearing a balaclav wearing.
A bellaclava, who's physically very violent. That you see that you also see signs of resistance from the victim. He wasn't taught what consent was. He wasn't taught what sexual violence actually looks like. So this is an otherwise. You know, this is a guy who earlier on that same evening had demonstrated the capacity to act as an ethical bystander, but in a sexual astay situation he did not, and he felt very, very guilty about that after all.
So I wouldn't have expected that answer from him. I thought it would have been, well, I couldn't have done anything. I was scared, I was the whole range of things. But I didn't expect that, and that came across the way you relate that they're very truthful, And.
What you know, one of the things that when I've written about this case is that I've said that Evan Westlake's choices that night reflect both the success of drink driving messaging in America. Sorry, but the absolute failure of consent and sexual violence prevention education because this is an individual who otherwise had he had the knowledge. And that's why I said before. You know, when we talk about ethical bystanders and the factors which encourage someone to take an intervention step, the very first thing is noticing the harm and interpreting the harm correctly. You can have all the ethical bystanders skills in the world, which he did, but he didn't notice the harm or interpret the harm correctly. So that's why, you know, if we're looking at well, what does it mean to do effective sexual violence prevention education in Australia. Absolutely we need consent education, but we need to really also talk about, well, what does sexual violence look like? What is it? And not shy away from these conversations. I've got a three year old son now, and you know, we keep it age appropriate, but we're already talking about consent in terms of his body and sharing toys and you know, not taking other toys without other people's toys without asking, and giving hugs, and you know, like you keep it age appropriate, but you can introduce those concepts very early on.
And I think there is a role to play.
Like we've talked when the kids have left home or where young adults have left home at university or starting in the football team, but it starts from an early age, doesn't in the home? What's acceptable what's not acceptable? Tell me with the football culture. And we're winding back to two thousand and four, do you think there's been progress?
I don't know, And I think until there is research to demonstrate one way or the other, I wouldn't want to hypothesize. I think that within the wider community there is certainly evolution and growth, and I think we've become a lot more comfortable talking about these problems than we used to be. I remember when I first went public as a survivor myself. That was back in two thousand and seven, and it was a completely different context. And I you know, I sometimes think that you know, the younger generations, you don't know what you don't know and fair enough, and like when I went public, there weren't very many other survivors of sexual violence who had gone public. There was teag and Wagner, but it was very you know, this was before the media movement, before and before social I think, you know, one of the things that social media has done is that it's made survivors visible to each other, that you can connect with each other not just through a hashtag, but through meaningful online engagement with there's you know, with online groups and so on. And I think that people finding community on.
The strength in the fact that you're not law.
Absolutely, and I think that that has definitely, you know, for a crime which is so steeped in often anyway, it's often steeped in shame and stigma and isolation. Social media has been a real antidote in terms of being able to break down that isolation. And then in turn, I think over time, then people once they find each other and they're able to distill through some of the issues and make sense. And you know, often you know, survivors will be much harder on themselves than they would ever be on their worst enemy. They will blame themselves when they would never blame somebody else who'd been through their experience. And when they see that reflected in other in peers, that can help build the confidence to their own and re well.
Not even sexual assaults, but I see victims in a lot of crimes sometimes blame themselves and they're the victims, and you have to point that out that you're not to blame. It's not by your actions or you walk there, or you did this or you should have done that.
You're a victim.
Someone's committed the offense. You're not to blame for it. But I think it's just part of the psyche that victims go through when they're mulling over what's happened. How could they prevented that. I'm curious because I look at it, and you've taught me a lot, just in the short conversation as you've reckmen notes, but you've taught You've taught me a lot. I always think in those organizations and I look at it, I look at it a blow key point of view in the football environment, and I see that groups of males. How do you have educate people to really stand up and be strong? Because I can, let's take it away from sexual assault, corruption within the police. I know there's some charismatic people that are in the areas I've worked in. If they take people down the wrong path, people tend to follow, and it's only a few that will stand up. How do we get those role models? Because I think it's not just males that can females as well. How do we create those role models where people feel empowered to stand up and you're not going to get criticized. Some people might not like you, and you you might lose some aspects of your friendships or your career.
But how are we going to encourage people to speak up?
So I think the first thing is that it's not about trying to change the individual. It's about changing the environment around them so that if a person does take the step to speak up, they know what the response is going to be and they feel safe to do it. So it's about changing the environment to make it very clear to people that if you do speak up about whatever the problem is, that there will be that the reaction from the institution or the organization or the community will be a supportive reaction, because when you know people are if you hear you know, somebody tells And we've all done this, We've all, every single one of us has been in a situation in our life where we've heard a joke that has crossed the line or a comment that's crossed the line, and it's made us uncomfortable, and we've known it's wrong, and we wanted to say something, but we didn't. And if you look at and you unpack why didn't we, often it's because there is a fear of social failure if we speak up and we get it wrong, or that we're going to speak up and then we're going to become the next target of the bully or the person who's making the inappropriate comment. So part of the way you change that is is that you I mean, ideally you change the behavior in the first place, and you'd prevent those attitudes to begin with. But failing that, the way that you address that is that you make it really clear that if a person speaks up, the social response is not going to be one of backlash or one of humiliation. It's going to be one of relief. And that's one of the things that people are often really surprised to learn is that I remember doing a workshop this is again in a previous role of my previous life, but doing a workshop with some high school students, some high school boys, about ethical bystander behavior, and we were exploring a situation, a true story, true situation that had happened where a group of young guys, high school students, I think they're about fifteen years old, had been at a party. Parents were away for the weekend house party, etc. One of the boys had passed out drunk and his mates, having a joke, having a laugh, got out the old magic marker and you know, started drawing things on his face and you know, writing things on his on his body. And then one of the kids took it one step further and decided to super glue this kid's eyelashes shut, thinking that when he woke up and his eyelashes with super glued shut, he'd think he you know, he was literally blind and you know, blah blah blah. You can see how this can happen, right, And they did that, and then one of the friends went, you know what, We've gone too far. We shouldn't have done this. I'm going to google what removes super glue? Do you know what removes super glued?
What does remove super glue?
I've never I've never super glued anyone's eyelashes.
So one of the things is acetone, right, okay, So now polish removing exactly. So they google this and they're like, all right, now polish remover. So they go off and they find and the mother's now polish remover and they're just about to start putting now polish remover on this kid's eyes. When the same kid who had said I don't think we should have you know, this has gone too far says, I don't know if we should be doing this. I'm going to call my mom now. The moment that fifteen year old boy says, I'm going to call my mom, how did the other fifteen year old boys react.
Oh, they would have gone in the panic.
Mate, it died, call your mom. And thankfully, this particular kid had the kind of relationship with his parents. The mother was a nurse, and the kind of relationship where he felt empowered to do that and knew that he would not get in trouble. Knew that the response from mum would be helpful. So he called his mum and the mum said, do not put now polishing anywhey, that's kid's eyes. Now polish remover can cause blindness. And she said, I'm coming straight over. She got, she came up, They got the kid to hospital. They had to pluck out his eyelashes from memory, but they saved the kid's eyesight. And I was doing this having this conversation with this group of young guys and I said, you know, put yourself in the shoes of that kid when he says, I'm going to call my mom and all of your mates are saying no, no, no, no, no where we're going to get busted. You know, we're all drinking under it. You know, how hard is it to be that kid when all of your mates are telling you no and to follow through and call your mum.
It's hard.
But now put yourself in his shoes the next day, when a doctor tells you, well done, su, you just saved your mate's eye sight, how good do you feel in that moment? And so all of us, at some point in our life have been in that position where we should have done something and we didn't, and we felt regret later and we felt shame later that we didn't do it. But we've also all been in a situation at some point where we have actually u up for somebody or we have taken a step to intervene, and you feel and to reflect on how you feel afterwards. And even though it is risky, emotionally risky at the time, and you do feel uncomfortable sticking your head out, you do feel good afterwards. And that's and talking about these things and unpacking the feelings is actually one way in which we can begin intervening in and giving people the skills to actually do this, to reflect on.
Times stories like that, that would be a good story. That's telling school for people to understand that there can be consequences from what appeared.
Or start off is innocent and no one, no one.
Spake up, but it's hard, like it's hard and invariably, and we start off talking about in university, people are vulnerable in that environment because you're coming there and you're desperate to belong. It's your first day at your new school. Basically, that's right.
And you know, I remember, just you know, talking about some of these stories. I remember being sixteen myself and being at a house party where there were no parents and there was a lot of drinking going on and seeing girl very very drunk on the couch and a bit of a creepy guy acting a bit too close, and I remember looking around thinking where are her friends? Why isn't somebody going in? And it never occurred to me that I could be that person, because back then, you know, there was I firstly, I hadn't had any education about ethical bystander behavior It wasn't until I started working in this space. And then I remember, like as a in my twenties, being in clubs and seeing I remember seeing one particular young woman in a club who was very drunk standing against a wall and this guy clearly she didn't want him around her, and he kept going back, and I remember watching this for a second, and again I didn't know her, but because I'd had this education and I was sort of working in this space now, I just walked over to her and very casually said, hey, hon, do you know where the bathrooms are?
Oh?
Do you want to come with me? And pulling her into the bathroom and just being like you, okay, do you know that guy? Now? Again took two minutes out of my life. Simplest intervention in terms of in terms of what it cost me of my night, but may have been the difference. And she wasn't comfortable, she wasn't okay, And so then I was able to find where her friends were and connect her back with her friends. But again, like with all of these actions, if we're talking about sexual violence prevention or prevention of any kind of negative behavior, often it's you know so much of I guess what I'm trying to say. So much of our prevention efforts are focused on how do we prevent the offender from doing the offending, and I think that's very important that we have that focus, but we also need to look at the role of bystanders and work out how is a community do we operate, what values do we hold? How do we educate our kids of what to do if they're in a situation so that they can step up or step in and be that bystander who.
Well, it's fighting crime one a one, like if the victim and you try to prevent all strengthen that when banks were robbed, and it's a horrible analogy, but banks robbed all the time. Then they got security screens in and CCTV footage made it almost impossible to run in and rob a bank. You're talking about creating an environment, and this is my takeaway on it, through education and understanding that helps protect potential victims. Creating an environment that it's more difficult to do. That analogy that you used in the nightclub, like we've all seen people and you walk past and you think, well, it's not really my business and that, but if we all looked out for each other. Maybe we do make it harder for I call them creeps. I can't help. But the people, let's call it for what it is, they shit me, the ones that take advantage of vulnerable people.
And yeah, and giving young people the scripts of like if in that moment it's too risky for you to go and do something or say something, who else in the environment can you draw on the bouncer, the bartender that you know, Like.
Well, that's right, because sometimes that it might be a personal physical risk. It's stepping in, but you've got people there that they're in control.
And it's also going to be a very different reaction. Like if we use that scenario of the girl in the bar, it's a very big difference between me walking over and new walking over because of gender and how that's coded. And you know, for a guy walking over to step in could become very adversarial very quickly with that guy, whereas a girl it's a woman, it can diffuse. So again it's also about thinking how what is the best way to diffuse this situation? Who else is available in this environment? Is it about going to a bartender or a stuff or having a female go and check on the female to see issues. Okay, you know there's different ways of exploring scenarios, and I think a lot of that education that's been done around ethical by standard behavior and so on draws on these real life scenarios to get people to unpack. You know that there's not necessarily one right answer to resolve any of these scenarios, but it's about exploring what are the tools available in each of these scenarios.
Well, I think we're going to call part one ethical bystander behavior because I think a great message to get out there, very good message. Let's take a break now, I'll rip my notes up and we'll come back, and I'm sure we've got a lot more to talk about. But look, I just want to say, Nina, sitting down and speaking to you, I'm learning a learning a lot about different approaches and how to make a difference. So full credit to you on the message in that you're getting across.
Thank you.