When Pieta (whose last name we have left out to protect her privacy) was 20, she started a new job. Within days, her social media inboxes were filled with explicit, personal messages from a stranger. It didn’t take her long to figure out that the sender was a colleague, a man about twice her age.
And the stalking didn’t stay online.
“He ended up driving to my house after finding my address online … he wrote letters and dropped them in my letterbox,” she says.
The Detail can’t reveal his name – Pieta never went through the legal system – but his list of convictions is long and includes stalking-related charges, and he’s currently incarcerated.
Part of the reason she never went through the court was that a family friend, a police officer, told her the legal process would be so long and difficult that it wouldn’t be worth it. But there’s another reason that might have made it hard to get anywhere with a case: compared with many cases, hers was considered “minor” and under the law then, stalking wasn’t explicitly criminal: his actions would have had to fall under a variety of other charges, like harassment or breaking restraining orders.
As of today, that’s changed: The Crimes Legislation (Stalking and Harassment) Amendment Bill, which comes into effect today, criminalises stalking.
On today’s episode of The Detail, Pieta tells her story, and criminal trial lawyer Katie Hogan KC explains what legislation existed, and what changed under the new law.
“The new definition of stalking is very wide; it’s much wider than the definitions we have under existing offence law,” she says.
“For example, stalking occurs if there are two specified incidents under a two-year period. Under the [previous] law it’s two incidents in a 12-month period, so you can see the definition has widened out to two years.
“Also the definition of what constitutes an incident is wide in the extreme – all sorts of problematic behaviour are included in it.”
She says until now, police have had to fit stalking into a variety of other offences.
“For example in the Crimes Act you can be prosecuted for any assault that takes place, you can be prosecuted for threats, you can be prosecuted for blackmail, you can be prosecuted for fraud, so sometimes stalking behaviour falls into those categories.
“There are also some more stalking-like offences already in existence, but they’re not in the Crimes Act.
“For example, there is an offence under our Harassment Act called ‘criminal harassment’ that only has a two-year maximum penalty.”
But these fell short.
‘The Harassment Act regime isn’t really fit for purpose, it’s not nimble, it doesn’t provide police with any nip-things-in-the-bud powers.”
Hogan says the new legislation gives police more flexibility and “the ability potentially to arrest and control the behaviour of someone during a prosecution more effectively through bail conditions and the like.”
This change could potentially save lives. One of the better known cases involving stalking in New Zealand was of 21-year-old Farzana Yaqubi, who was subjected to relentless stalking by 30-year-old Kanwarpal Singh. She’d reported him to police multiple times, but in 2022, he murdered her.
Now, “if a first stalking incident is reported, police have the power to warn the alleged stalker that their behaviour is constituting a stalking incident.
“The chances of them being successfully prosecuted are much higher once they have that knowledge.”
However, there is a potential downside to this.
“Some victims groups are concerned about that power to warn and the implications to a victim’s safety once the person has been warned … stalkers statistically can escalate if authorities are reported to.”
The new law will allow for a prison term of up to five years, which Hogan says is in line with comparable countries.
“All the overseas jurisdictions that we compare ourselves to have these offences in place, most of them with five-year maximum penalties, some with 10-year maximum penalties.”
Hogan says until now, New Zealand has been lagging behind.
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