For many women and survivors of sexual violence, the crux of Jack Tame’s extraordinary interview with Andrew Coster wasn’t the part where the former police commissioner narked on Mitchell and Hipkins, but when he used the ‘h’ word.

Who knew what when, who told who. This week, as we watch high-up men engage in playground-level scrapping about who should take the responsibility for allowing convicted sex offender Jevon McSkimming close to the top job, let’s all just take a quick breath and remember; growing up is really hard to do.

Remember when you were little, and a kid wanted the stick you were playing with, but you had it first, and it was the best stick? So then stick-acquisition became a game of strategy – do you hit them harder and grab their stick then pretend to cry, apologise with your fingers crossed behind your back, or act like you had nothing to do with it? 

If watching the Andrew Coster–Mark Mitchell–Chris Hipkins war of words that’s been playing out across media feels tiring, it’s because deflection is designed this way; as a slippery, elusive thing, hard to get your head around. Trading blows also plays into a need to blame someone – a scapegoat to take the fall so this all can be tucked neatly away. Back to business, boys. 

It’s important that the right people are held accountable for the failings in integrity that protected a police officer and led to his complainant being prosecuted. It’s also important that we don’t lose sight of the reasons why many survivors of sexual violence still don’t come forward, or trust police, and why women still aren’t believed when they do report assaults. 

But, like, I don’t want to be hysterical. 

For many women and survivors of sexual violence, the crux of Jack Tame’s extraordinary interview with Coster on Q+A wasn’t the part where Coster narked on Mitchell and Hipkins. It was the fact that the former top cop was somehow able to “sincerely apologise” to an alleged victim of sexual violence in one breath while describing her behaviour as “increasingly hysterical” the next, and be able to continue on as if nothing has happened.

In talking about what he told IPCA chair Judge Johnston KC in a briefing in mid-2023, Coster said: “I believe he has acknowledged that I disclosed to him that there was a relationship, an affair with a young woman, that subsequently she’s become increasingly hysterical… with communications being sent…

“The people that I briefed, admittedly, sharing my view of it, all formed much the same view of the situation that I did and appeared to presume that it was a private matter, that it hadn’t reached the threshold for something different to be done.”

But, wait – was this the same young woman he said sorry to 38 minutes earlier for the “horrible experience” she’d been through? And the same interview where he used words like “extremely competent” to describe how he felt about McSkimming, now a convicted criminal? In which he said he “didn’t have visibility” of the trauma to the victim, but that the worst-case scenario was, if the allegations against him were false, McSkimming would be victimised and miss out on a job?

Coster was one of those whose actions copped criticism in the damning IPCA report, which said he fell “well short” of police behaviour standards. In the Tame interview, as well as a statement when he resigned from the Social Investment Agency, Coster said he acted honestly and in good faith, accepting he had made mistakes. “While it is not possible to alter past events, I am prepared to take responsibility – I got this wrong.”

But with Tame, he also equivocates. He blames the media. He says: “This wasn’t happening in a corner, lots of people knew about it, and there is a lot of strong judgments now being applied to the decisions that were made and rightly so. It just appears to me that it’s being done without the context as it existed for many people at that time.”

So, let’s quickly look at that context. Put very simply, misogyny is prejudice against women, which would allow a situation to take hold institutionally, like, say, a man in a top job (MsSkimming) could create a version of events (a woman scorned who wants to take revenge), which would be accepted and passed on by those around him.

The word “hysteria” ties in here, as a word – and concept – that’s been used for centuries to dismiss women’s emotional and physical needs, to portray women as crazy or overwrought or maybe just making the whole thing up. 

The Greek word for womb, hysteria has its roots with 5th century Hippocrates, who believed that a “wandering womb” was the origin of all diseases in women, including that of excessive emotion. As recently as the 20th century it was a commonly diagnosed disorder, and while we now know it doesn’t exist, the term has longevity as “a dramatic medical metaphor for everything that men found mysterious or unmanageable” in women, and of “evidence” of the instability of the female mind. 

So, while men are often trusted and believed, women have to work harder to prove that something happened, to get people to take it seriously, to investigate, and historically this has been related to their gender. 

Around one in three women in New Zealand experiences sexual violence. The majority of those don’t report it to police. Until we are shown there’s a culture where survivors will be listened to, it’s hard to see how this can ever change. 

That’s the context.