MediaMay 23, 2018

Critic editor: why we made the Menstruation Issue

Wellington editor

Yesterday the University of Otago seized thousands of copies of its own students’ association’s magazine. The editor of Critic Te Arohi, Joel MacManus, talks through the genesis of the menstruation issue – and yesterday’s extraordinary events.

Two months ago, the Otago Women’s+ Club approached me about the idea to do a menstruation themed issue of Critic to tie into Period Week, an event they were organising. Their goal was to start an open discourse and encourage people to treat periods not as a taboo but as a bodily function. Seems ironic now.

I initially wasn’t too keen on the idea. I wasn’t sure there would be enough quality content to justify an entire themed issue. My backup plan was to try to negotiate them down to just a cover story.

As it turned out, my worries were warrantless. The news team came through with stories about a scheme to provide discounted menstrual cups to students, and proved that the University of Otago had falsely claimed that there were sanitary disposal bins available in every female cubicle on campus when that wasn’t anywhere near the truth.

The features team wrote pieces disproving common period myths, investigated all the places on campus you can find free sanitary products, and wrote a guide to ‘sexing it up in shark week’. Eighteen of our readers shared their best/worst period stories.

Chief Reporter Esme Hall wrote a guest editorial titled ‘Talking about periods is a very good thing,’ which kind of summed up the whole point of the issue.

The cover which so offended the University of Otago

Some of the stories touched on the idea that trans men also get periods, and so throughout the issue we refrained from referring to periods as something that only women get, choosing to use gender-inclusive terms instead. Saskia Rushton-Green, a freelance illustrator, designed the cover with this in mind, depicting a deliberately gender-neutral person menstruating.

“The image shows how people who bleed are pulling through with a smile and a thumbs up, even when they feel really gross,” she said.

“I certainly never intended this piece to be degrading to women/anyone who bleeds from their vagina, in fact I hope some people find it empowering. I bleed for about a third of my life and it’s not glamorous. I’d love to live in a world where if someone bleeds through their pants a little by no fault of their own, someone tells them, nobody gives a shit, and that person goes and sorts it out, but we’re not there yet. There’s a lot of underlying judgement around it that makes bleeding more stressful than it needs to be.”

We printed 4,500 copies, and on Sunday evening, the Menstruation Issue of Critic was distributed to stands around campus. On Monday, the pick up was going well. I personally went through the Central Library and restocked stands twice. It was definitely a cover that got people’s attention. It was feeling like a good week.

At around 7pm I checked on a stand in a lecture theatre where the pickup is usually quite slow, but to my surprise it was totally empty. I checked three other leacture theatres, all empty.

It was clear someone had come through and wiped them out.

By yesterday morning it became clear that it was every single stand in every single building on campus. Someone really didn’t want the issue out there. We were missing around 2000 copies and had no idea who had taken them.

It honestly felt like a kick to the guts. We’d worked our asses off making this issue and it was something I was incredibly proud of. And we had just lost half our readers, who now wouldn’t be able to get their hands on it.

The staff threw a bunch of theories around – was it a religious group, an anti-trans activist, or a lone wolf trying to cover up a story? It was such a big effort that it clearly required a team of people, and presumably a vehicle to carry hundreds of copies in.

We never considered the University. Firstly, they always come to us or to OUSA whenever they have an issue. And secondly, I got an email around noon Tuesday (17 hours after the copies were taken) from Vice Chancellor Harlene Hayne which said “I did want to let you know that this week’s issue of the Critic is particularly good.”

I emailed Property Services, who “categorically” said it wasn’t them. They pointed me to Campus Watch, who they said might have CCTV footage.

At least six stands, and probably more, were directly in the line of sight of cameras, so I went to the Campus Watch office and filled out a form. They said they would look into it.

It was at this point that I posted on the Critic Facebook page that the copies had been taken, expressed how disheartened we were, and asked anyone who knew who was responsible to get in touch.

Stuff, Newshub and the Otago Daily Times called me and wrote stories about the mystery of the missing issues. They all reached out to the University for comment.

At 6pm the University sent out a press release in response to the requests which said that Campus Watch had been instructed to remove every issue and throw them in a skip, because the cover was “objectionable” and children might see it.

Hi there. Here is the statement from the University that has not been published in full in other media regarding the removal of the magazine. pic.twitter.com/ZHDer4ggZH

— University of Otago (@otago) May 22, 2018

This was the first we had been told of any problem with the issue. We found out in the same way and at the same time as the rest of the media.

There was one part of the University’s statement that really pissed me off.

“The University has no official view on the content of this week’s magazine. However, the University is aware that University staff members, and members of the public, have expressed an opinion that the cover of this issue was degrading to women.”

I read that as a backhanded attack on our magazine and a personal insult to the integrity of our staff. The decision to do a menstruation issue was made after a suggestion by the Otago Womens+ Club, all the menstruation-related content was written by female or non-binary contributors, and the cover artwork (which was of a non-gendered person) was done by a woman.

It seemed like nothing more than a shitty attempt to shift the blame after they fucked up. And they didn’t even have the integrity to put their own name to it. They were trying to attack us without officially attacking us.

We have the right to print provocative covers, and we so do because they start conversations. Student media should be able to push boundaries.

As one person on Twitter pointed out, this attempt at censorship turned out to be a free lesson in The Streisand Effect

As of writing this, the PDF version of our magazine has been read 9000 times online. That’s about 8900 more than what we get on a typical week, and double our total print run, and there are copies on Trademe for $40 a pop.

As Hermione Granger put it, “If she could have done one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will read your interview, it was banning it!”

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A homeless person sleeping on a park bench at Victoria Park, Auckland. (Photo: Dean Purcell/Getty Images)

MediaMay 22, 2018

No, Reuters, we don’t have tens of thousands sleeping in cars and on the street

Toby Manhire

Editor-at-large

A homeless person sleeping on a park bench at Victoria Park, Auckland. (Photo: Dean Purcell/Getty Images)

Homelessness in New Zealand is a very serious problem, and it’s too important to be muddied by misinformation, writes Toby Manhire.

One of the world’s gold-standard news agencies yesterday shone a light on a big New Zealand problem, homelessness.

The headline: “Left behind – why boomtown New Zealand has a homelessness crisis”. And the introduction, in print and video reports: “New Zealand’s dairy-fuelled economy has for several years been the envy of the rich world, yet despite the rise in prosperity tens of thousands of residents are sleeping in cars, shop entrances and alleyways.”

The juxtaposition is compelling and well made. The number is compelling and nonsense.

There are not tens of thousands of New Zealanders sleeping in cars, shop entrances and alleyways. There just aren’t.

No question, the homelessness problem is very often hidden from sight, invisible to those of us living luckier lives – but surely not so invisible that a population the size of a city such as Whanganui could be sleeping rough around New Zealand.

Earlier this month the Guardian reported that “An estimated 40,000 people live in cars, tents and garages amid a chronic housing shortage in the nation of 4.7 million people”. Adding garages to the equation might make some difference, but still: a chronic shortage housing, yes; 40,000 people — a population the size of Whanganui — living in cars, tents and garages? No.

That came in a report (see also Canadian public radio) which had a heroically absurd standfirst bolted above it: “New Zealand government announces $100m to get 40,000 homeless people into accommodation before winter hits”. For all that Phil Twyford might thump his chest with ambition, he never announced any such thing.

The government press release in fact pledged this: “By the end of winter, we will have more than 1,500 additional transitional, public and Housing First places, compared to the end of last year.” And to confuse matters further, if you’re using the measure that would define 40,000-plus New Zealanders as homeless, then many of those 1,500 brought out of the cold under the government’s $100 million initiative would be put in accommodation that would see them categorised as … homeless.

So where did this 40,000 confusion spring from?

The authoritative study on homelessness in New Zealand is Severe Housing Deprivation in Aotearoa/New Zealand: 2001-2013, published by Kate Amore in 2016 as part of the He Kainga Oranga/Housing & Health Research Programme at the University of Otago, Wellington. The PDF is here.

“The severely housing deprived or ‘homeless’ population has grown in size and scale over the last three censuses, at an accelerating rate,” writes Amore, introducing the key findings. “The prevalence of homelessness grew by 15% between the 2006 and 2013 censuses, compared with a 9% increase between 2001 and 2006. In 2013, there were at least 41,000 homeless New Zealanders, or about one in every 100 New Zealanders.”

It’s a shocking number – and it’s a depressingly safe bet that the number has grown considerably since. But the report at no point suggests that the 41,000 figure, the one in 100, refers to people sleeping rough.

In a release accompanying the report’s publication, Amore put it like this: “If the homeless population were a hundred people, 70 are staying with extended family or friends in severely crowded houses, 20 are in a motel, boarding house or camping ground, and 10 are living on the street, in cars, or in other improvised dwellings. They all urgently need affordable housing.”

The majority of those 41,207 people who are severely housing deprived – 28,563 of them – are classified as living “as a temporary resident in a severely crowded, permanent private dwelling due to a lack of access to minimally adequate housing”.

That is miserable and unacceptable for a well-off nation, but it is not the same as living in an alleyway or a car. The study counts 1,413 people living rough or in an improvised dwelling and 2,784 in a mobile dwelling, with another 549 in NGO-run emergency accommodation and 1,724 in camping grounds or motor camps.

Those numbers draw on census and emergency housing provider data, and may well underestimate the number of people sleeping rough. It will almost certainly have grown in the interim. But it is nothing like “tens of thousands … sleeping in cars, shop entrances and alleyways”.

Both the Reuters and Guardian reports also state that New Zealand has the highest rate of homelessness among the OECD club of the world’s richest countries. You can hardly blame them for that – it’s a claim that has been made, based on OECD data, in a Yale study, and repeated ad infinitum by media everywhere, including a fulminating media release by the Labour Party in opposition.

But – really? Here’s a chart, based on OECD numbers, from that oft-cited Yale study.

New Zealand has a homelessness problem. No question about that. But is it plausible that New Zealand has a homelessness problem five times worse than the United States? Twenty-odd times worse than Spain? Anyone who has travelled around those places would find that hard to credit.

At the foot of the chart, the fine print begins: “Definitions and policies on homelessness are mixed among and within nations …” The definitions are dramatically different, of course, and so the chart is ridiculous.

The Yale study seeks to highlight the severity of homelessness in the developed world, to urge political action. The Reuters piece is full of moving testimony from people at the sharp end of the housing crisis. Homelessness and housing insecurity in New Zealand is hugely important and worthy of international attention. But it should be important enough, too, to warrant reporting without the wild numbers.

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