Kuriger BarbaraCRIMES (CHILD EXPLOITATION OFFENCES) AMENDMENT BILLThird ReadingANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): I move That the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. It's my privilege to rise and speak in the third reading of this bill. This bill is now in my name. However I want to thank the previous sponsor my friend the Hon Ginny Andersen for her work over nearly two years to get this bill to this point. I want to put on record my thanks for her earnest work in improving the safety of our children and young people in an ever-present aspect of our lives the online world. I'd also like to thank the members of the Justice Committee the officials from the Ministry of Justice the Office of the Clerk and the parliamentary counsel who worked to support the select committee to get the bill into this stronger position. Finally a thankyou to the submitters who contributed to the changes found here. Originally the bill created two offences: digital communication with a young person under 16 with the intent to mislead and digital communication with a young person under 16 with the intent to cause harm. However at the select committee changes were made and what this bill now does is to bring together those two acts into one space. It modernises our law to reflect the reality that our children live in and hopefully it makes it easier to prosecute those perpetrators that prey upon our children by grooming them. This bill is designed to help ensure that our justice system can respond appropriately to protect our young people from those who engage in acts to harm young people while also maintaining in-person grooming as a crime. As introduced the bill focused on digital harm. The committee heard from a number of submitters who defined grooming behaviour as broad strategies to facilitate sexual contact which happens both online and in person. The committee believed that any new offences should cover digital harm as well as any other type of communication or conduct with a young person that leads to harmful prohibited behaviour so this bill was widened to capture both in-person and online grooming. The committee recommended replacing clause 4 of the bill with the committee's proposed clause 4 to insert a new section into the Act. This section would make it an offence for someone over the age of 18 to communicate by words or conduct with a person under the age of 16. Essentially there would need to be an intention to facilitate the young person engaging or being involved in conduct that would be an offence under either Part 7 of the Crimes Act relating to crimes against morality and decency sexual crimes and crimes against public welfare; or section 98AA of the Act relating to sexual exploitation of a person. The bill has now inserted a new offence under new section 131AB Grooming for sexual conduct with young person". The ingredients of that crime include that "(a) they communicate by words or conduct with a person under 16 years (the young person); and (b) they do so intending to facilitate the young person engaging or being involved in conduct that would be an offence against this Part" or against any of the specified paragraphs in section 98AA(1) of the Act—essentially communicating intentionally with a person under 16 to facilitate their engagement in sexual exploitation. New section 131AB(2) notes that "It is immaterial whether or not a response is made to the communication by the young person." This is important because the intention to do the harm or the attempt at the grooming online or in person is still there regardless of whether the young person participated further with that groomer. It's also important that an actual physical meeting of the victim and perpetrator does not need to happen either and this is the modernising. The crime is complete when the ingredients in new section 131AB(1)(a) and (b) occur. Finally new section 131AB(3) gives us the statement that a reference to a young person also includes a constable pretending to be a young person—and this is a fictitious young person—if the offender believes that the fictitious young person is under the age of 16 years. So this is important because it's used for when a constable is pretending to be a young person in for example a sting operation to catch a sexual predator. It is immaterial that that constable is not under 16; it is only that the offender believes that they are under 16.The premeditation and planning that goes into child grooming is complex so it's important to have an offence that may enable an earlier intervention. Reducing or stopping harm in this way is a worthy goal as earlier prosecutions reduce harm.Fundamentally this bill was drafted to support the safety of our children in the online world. I raised my children in a more benign digital world. There were very few digital platforms back then and it was easier to monitor activity. My children weren't gamers and smartphones didn't exist. Now there is a huge array of social media and methods to capture our under-16s. Along with the substantial opportunities that the digital age brings there also comes a diverse range of risks and harms. Digital technologies have increased the scale of sexual abuse and exploitation. Child sexual offenders have increased access to children and young persons through unprotected social media profiles and online gaming forums. The online space is an ever-changing world both positive and negative and this bill seeks to provide another tool for catching the child sex offender in the online context before further harm occurs.NetSafe and the Ministry for Women conducted a survey in 2021. The survey found that seven in 10 New Zealand teenagers had experienced at least one type of unwanted digital communication within the past year and 19 percent of those surveyed had been asked for a nude or a nearly nude image of themselves to be shared. It's clear that we need further tools to act and protect to support our young people and it is clear we need more modern tools to support our police force to catch those predators. This bill supports this work.Recently I watched a video of a non-profit group in the US. They created a social experiment where they wanted to see how long it would take a predator to approach an underage person. They created a 15-year-old persona and once live that persona—it was found that it was just an hour to the first approach and by day nine there had been 92 separate approaches. Shockingly almost 10 adult men per day were bombarding the fictitious 15-year-old with sexually explicit content and they also attempted to contact the person in-person as well. Honestly it was one of the most chilling things that I've ever seen. The woman who posed as the young person said at the end of the video that she'd reflected on what she would have done if she was a child dealing with this level of online predatory messaging. She said she would have kept the abuse to herself for fear of being shamed and blamed. She would have suffered with it secretly and quietly.Today we take another step towards protecting those young people so that they don't take the blame for being groomed by a predator that seeks to abuse them. This bill allows for us as lawmakers as parents and as adults to protect all of our children in this online world and to close down additional avenues to groom children.New Zealand's NetSafe—in my last 55 seconds—has a really useful online tool kit and I thought that I would mention it in the context of this bill for parents to have a look at. It's the online safety parent tool kit a really useful tool which I recommend people look at. There are seven steps to get your family started on keeping them safe from online predators and these steps are to understand learn explore agree teach model and plan. I'm honoured to have my name on this bill and I'm thankful for the hard world that has gone in before my contribution. I'd like to finally acknowledge those who work in the field of sexual violence and thank them very much for the hard work that they do. I commend this bill to the House.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Barbara Kuriger): The question is that the motion be agreed to."