Henderson Emily; Rurawhe AdrianDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): Mr Speaker—and I am grateful to the members across the House. I rise to speak and commend this bill to the House. It's been my privilege in my adult life to do extensive work in the subject of sex offending. The treatment of sex offenders is something that I have briefly touched upon in my academic life. I also really strongly tautoko the work that the Greens and the Labour Party did last term in terms of the way in which we are tackling sex offending and sex offender treatment the general protection of our victims because one thing is very clear: this is a massive problem in our society.I do want to say something. This is not a recent problem. If you go back to the early 1980s when we were first doing proper empirical studies of child sex offending the figures found then were one-in-three to one-in-four girls about one-in-nine boys. Those remain the figures that we still find today across the OECD. This is an epidemic of very very long standing. And I want to say that because I think it goes some way to answer the Greens' concern as to the retrospectivity of this law. There is justification; when we have a problem of this magnitude we need to take it very very seriously. And one of the issues with this—in fact I really want to break what I'm going to say today into two parts. I want to talk about the incidence of child sex abuse and the fact that although we know the rates are so high we actually still know very little about the actual rate of offending. The studies we have do not accurately cover the full extent of what is going on. So if you look what we find is that in a recent study of high school students in New Zealand in 2011 about 20 percent of girls and 9 percent of boys said they had experienced sexual touching unwanted sexual touching or been asked to perform an unwanted sexual act in the last 12 months. But more than half of them said that they had not previously reported this and that is absolutely the norm. The fact is that more than half of child sex offences are never reported during childhood to anyone—not to mum not to auntie let alone the police. And the general feeling is that across the board with sex offences only about 10 percent are ever reported to the police. So when you are talking about child sex offences over half of them don't come to light until the victim is an adult. This is a massively unreported crime. Icebergs and tips of icebergs don't come into it.When we're then looking at it you then have to factor in: how do we then deal with the sex offenders we know about? And what you have to look at then is the fact that we have some expertise in this country in sex offender treatment and we know through Te Ohaakii a Hine—National Network Ending Sexual Violence Together and other programmes including some in Whangārei—of which I am well aware because I have family members who work in them as the directors of them—what we need when we're treating sex offences is a wraparound response. We need people to keep tabs on the person's interaction across their whānau. We need that ongoing in-depth response in order to help people avoid their triggers because what we know about sex offending is it's frequently compulsive offending. If it is a teenage offender—I do want to make this point: teenage offenders are not as much to be feared. If someone is offending in their teenage years it is very often not going to be something that becomes seriously recidivist. If someone is offending in their mid-to-late 20s then the research says you really do have to be worried about this person. So we need this in-depth response. Now when you look at what the register that we are talking about actually does—and this is where I also come back to our colleagues in the Greens and say this is a muted and appropriate response in terms of its impact on the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. When you actually look at what the police register then does we are not talking about plastering a neighbourhood with pictures of the person and their name. We are not talking about that sort of punitive unpleasant and frankly unhelpful reaction. We are talking about the police walking alongside offenders to assist them to ensure they do not put themselves into difficult situations. That is the reason that I commend this bill to the House: it is proportionate it is addressing a serious and longstanding need and it should go ahead in my submission.DEPUTY SPEAKER: According to my list we've got two Labour speakers and one National spot left so we'll go Arena Williams.