Wall LouisaHARMFUL DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS (UNAUTHORISED POSTING OF INTIMATE VISUAL RECORDING) AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingLOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou katoa. I move That the Harmful Digital Communications (Unauthorised Posting of Intimate Visual Recording) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Justice Committee to consider the bill. This bill recognises that non-consensual publications of an intimate visual image is in and of itself harmful because it involves a breach of trust and confidence as well as a significant invasion of privacy. Thus the harm is implicit in the action. I would like to acknowledge my colleagues the Hon Poto Williams and also the Hon Clare Curran—Poto initially for starting the process of looking at this particular kaupapa but also the Hon Clare Curran for taking an interest and actually introducing me to Judge Harvey and I want to acknowledge him because he helped me write that part of my explanatory note. So currently section 22 of the Harmful Digital Communications Act which is titled Causing harm by posting digital communication" requires firstly that a person has intended to cause harm when they post these digital images and secondly that a harm has actually occurred. So what this bill would clarify is that without consent such publications are a form of image-based sexual abuse. Now this terminology was coined by McGlynn and Rackley in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies in 2017. Their article highlighted how technology has transformed and expanded how sexual violence can be perpetrated which is manifest in the non-consensual distribution of private sexual images and it said that the law must respond to combat this form of sexual abuse. So why this bill? Why this bill is because there are victims. Those victims are harmed and I will now communicate the extent of that harm. To individuals there are physical and mental health issues—not in our jurisdiction but in other jurisdictions this has led to suicide. There's loss of dignity privacy and sexual autonomy. Collectively this is termed a form of cultural harm. These acts harm society because of how they portray women and they create an environment that can harm our children if we allow it to become normalised and this form of sexual abuse and violence is not normal and must be eradicated. I also want to acknowledge Netsafe's CEO Martin Cocker. I have engaged with him and I also want to acknowledge the publication Image-based sexual abuse: A snapshot of New Zealand's adults' experiences. In the summary of findings there are 3.4 million - odd adult New Zealanders and what that survey found was that nearly 5 percent of adult New Zealanders have said they have personally experienced image-based sexual abuse—that's 170000 adults—and of those 3 percent or 100000 have had their images shared online. Ninety-five percent of the victims are women. The other interesting phenomenon—and there's an article in the New Zealand Herald tonight—is that the 5 percent of men who are tricked by this image-based sexual abuse actually end up in what they call sextortions where they go online they have sexual interactions there's an image of part of their anatomy and then the people try and extract money from them. So as I said go on the New Zealand Herald website where there's an example of it as we speak. It's also a phenomenon—and I want to highlight this—for the LGBT community and also specifically for those who identify as Asian. What is image-based sexual abuse? I think we should define it. It's "sexting" it's dick pics it's revenge porn or as I categorise it it's image-based sexual abuse. Dr Claire Meehan who's an associate professor at the University of Auckland on 29 February wrote about the "Nudie Project". Essentially within that context she defined the urgent need for us to look at the sharing of images within the context of consent. That's in fact what this bill does. It's very clear: if you don't have consent then you can't post these images. It's used to control women. It's used when they're leaving a relationship or when they're pursuing legal action against their abusive partner. There are 3000 websites dedicated to this image-based sexual abuse. So this distribution is shaping how our children view women and notions such as "she wanted it" and "she deserved it".I've had to read up a lot on this technological phenomenon. Sexting between partners is a form of foreplay but obviously they're doing it with each other. The problem we have is when those partnerships break up and how those images are then used as a form of sexual violence.Finally I want to highlight that in April 2020 the classification office released a report titled Growing up with Porn: Insights from young New Zealanders. They surveyed 14- to 17-year-olds. Porn in New Zealand is highly accessible. It's normalised it's used for sexual arousal and that's how our kids are learning how to have sex. Within those contexts they're learning about gender roles and how to express sexuality. Sexting is how young people these days tell each other they like each other. It's a phenomenon. It's how they communicate their sexual interest. Young people in that survey said they need and want sex education and they need and want adults to talk to them. They want comprehensive sexuality education. Our children should not have to access porn to learn about sex about healthy relationships about consent and about mutual pleasure.So what this bill is doing is trying to address at one end of the spectrum but actually the relevance at the other end of the spectrum I actually think we should connect up. I'm going to take this opportunity to highlight the work of the Hon Tracey Martin who is very very concerned about access to porn and how our children are being normalised in terms of gender roles through some of that porn. But I also want to highlight the work of Jan Logie in her Sexual Violence Legislation Bill. The reality is they're both ends of the continuum. If our children are growing up thinking these types of sexual interactions are normal then there's no wonder we have such high rates of sexual violence in New Zealand. So I obviously am pleading with this House for us to have a very mature conversation about the role of consent and about us eliminating this type of sexual violence sexual abuse and sexual exploitation and I very much look forward to the conversation that we will have hopefully through this bill with the New Zealand public. Kia ora."