Hundreds of thousands of New Zealand women are impacted by stalking and harassment, and collectively they’re being failed by the official response.
In August last year, The Spinoff received a polite yet tentative email from a 24-year-old woman named Zeni Gibson. “I am hoping to speak to someone about the possibility of publishing a personal story,” her email began.
I called Gibson shortly afterwards to discuss. When we began speaking, I was struck by how self-effacing and hesitant she was. “This is probably silly,” she’d say, or “I’m not sure if there’s any kind of story in this.” Then, over the course of around an hour, she relayed to me an intensely serious and horrifying account of stalking and harassment.
This morning, The Spinoff published that story – Gibson’s harrowing account of being stalked and harassed for almost a decade by an older man she barely knows and whom she rejected when she was 17.
The story is Gibson’s first-person account as told to me, but since our first phone call, I have been living and breathing this topic. And one thing that won’t necessarily come through from reading her account, and that I want to firmly underline, is this: Gibson’s story is extreme, but it isn’t rare.
Unlike in most parts of the European Union, UK, Australia and the United States, New Zealand doesn’t currently specifically criminalise stalking (although that will soon be changed), so it’s difficult to know for sure the number of victims. Still, we know that stalking and harassment are very common experiences for women. “It is likely that our overall statistics are similar” to Australia’s, where one in five women experience stalking in their lifetime, says Leonie Morris, project lead for Aotearoa Free From Stalking.
Around a third of New Zealand women surveyed by Amnesty International in 2017 said they had experienced online abuse and harassment, consistent with the 2021 NZ Crime and Victims Survey, which found that harassment and threats (crimes consistent with stalking) are two of the five most common crime experiences. Nearly two thirds of Women’s Refuge’s clients are stalked, according to the National Collective of Independent Women’s Refuges (NCIWR). The advent of the internet has made stalking and harassment easier to perpetrate.
“Stalking is a known precursor to physical violence,” Morris says. “Intimate partner stalking is associated with physical and sexual violence and an elevated risk of intimate partner homicide against women.”
While stalking and harassment are often perpetuated by women’s partners or ex-partners, it’s not rare for a stranger to be the perpetrator: over half (59%) of women surveyed globally by Amnesty International who’d experienced abuse or harassment online said it came from complete strangers. Sometimes the perpetrator might delusionally view himself as being a lover or spurned lover even if there was no romantic relationship, as in Gibson’s case and that of Auckland’s Farzana Yaqubi, who was murdered by her stalker in December 2022, after she reported his harassment to police.
Men can be victims of stalking and harassment, as the hit Netflix series Baby Reindeer illustrated in vivid detail. In Australia, one in 15 men have been stalked in their lifetime. However, women are disproportionately affected and young women are particularly targeted, according to the Auckland Coalition for the Safety of Women and Children (ACSWC) and NCIWR. As Gibson’s account makes clear, the abuse is often misogynistic in nature and threats of sexual violence are common.
It is difficult to overstate how negatively the experience impacts its victims, and reading a personal account like Gibson’s makes it easier to truly appreciate the toll than reading a dispassionate list of the ill-effects. Still, these include “fear and anxiety, a loss of sense of fairness and … control, and general distress”, according to NCIWR. “Moreover, psychological distress is only one aspect of the cumulative impacts of stalking. … [S]talking can precipitate the upheaval of [victims’] own and their children’s lives, the loss of employment and corresponding financial stability, a reduced level of social connectedness and reduced involvement in social and leisure activities, and victims’ increasingly restrictive and safety-seeking behaviour.”
“The impacts on mental state are arguably serious enough that the level of impairment they cause is equivalent to that caused by one or more psychiatric disorders,” according to NCIWR.
There are multiple barriers to justice for stalking victims. The first is that the crime is likely significantly underreported. A characteristic element of this offending is that it builds gradually – the “frog in a boiling pot” scenario – and it is common for victims to doubt themselves and downplay what is happening to them, like Gibson did, according to Manaaki Tāngata (Victim Support).
Another characteristic element of stalking is that any one of the actions might appear trivial, meaning victims, their friends and family, and police and other officials may all downplay them in isolation, even though the overall pattern of offending is very serious. Police admit they “find it challenging to respond to some stalking behaviours because they are lawful”, according to a 2022 Ministry of Justice briefing to the then minister of justice, Kiri Allan. “Also, the current definition of harassment does not capture surveillance and monitoring.”
A concrete example is illustrative here. When Gibson first relayed her story to me over the phone, she skipped over a detail I found chilling; almost didn’t bother to mention it, because it appeared to her so minor in the greater scheme of things. On two occasions, Greg had four Domino’s Meatlovers pizzas, with extra meat, ordered for delivery to Gibson’s mum’s house – the “joke” being that Gibson is vegan. This is not illegal; to an outsider with no context, it might even appear funny or generous. In fact, it’s deeply sinister; an indication of how far Greg would go to get under Gibson’s skin and remind her he knew where she lived.
Murdered student Farzana Yaqubi also received a surprise pizza delivery from her stalker. Two weeks later, he fatally stabbed her.
Another barrier to justice for victims is that stalking behaviours are often romanticised in the wider culture. Classic stalking behaviours like sending persistent declarations of love or leaving gifts at the victim’s home are coded as romantic rather than creepy or delusional. Again, this can lead to victims, their friends and family, and police and other officials downplaying what is occurring.
The lack of understanding about stalking means that victims are poorly served by the justice system, even if they do report. “Many women have told safety advocates that when they went to the police for support regarding stalking,” Morris says, “the police response boiled down to, ‘Sorry we can’t help you – but do be sure to keep yourself safe.’”
While a new stalking-specific offence (legislation to create it is being introduced to parliament before the end of the year) is certainly a positive step, it may take more than a law change before we see a shift in attitudes.
According to ACSWC and NCIWR, “The judiciary struggles with the concept of psychological abuse and requires the actions to be specified to gain a full understanding. There is also a lack of understanding among the judiciary that stalking and coercive control involve a pattern of actions, and a failure to consider the history that contributes to that pattern of control and abuse.”
These official attitudes are prohibitive: one reason victims don’t report stalking and harassment is that they anticipate unhelpful police and justice responses, according to 2019 research by NCIWR.
Another barrier to justice is that it’s difficult for media outlets to highlight stories like Gibson’s. They come with legal risks, especially defamation suits by perpetrators, and they require hours of fact checking and corroboration. Quite understandably, victims are often too fearful to draw attention to themselves and aren’t willing to risk the potential repercussions from their stalkers.
But one of the biggest difficulties is that telling these stories – especially in the as-told-to, first-person style – requires that victims relive some of the worst moments of their lives, over and over again. Gibson and I went back and forth on her story dozens of times. For each round of edits, I would prompt her to detail exactly how the stalking unfolded and exactly how the abuse was impacting her. She would occasionally need to take a break from the process – sometimes for weeks – but then she would leave me detailed margin notes: here’s how hard it was for me to leave the house, here’s how much I came to loathe my body, here’s the screenshot where Greg detailed the ways he wanted to mutilate me.
I have worked on stories about similar topics that have fallen through after weeks of reporting because the victims involved decided their hearts were no longer in it. That’s totally understandable – who could fault them?
In that sense, Gibson is extraordinary. She stuck with the brutal process because she was determined to tell her story, and decided it was worth the safety risks and personal toll. For that reason, you’re hearing her story. For the reasons outlined above, there are thousands of similar, and equally terrifying, stories that you won’t hear.