Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

It’s my privilege to rise and speak in the third reading of this bill. This bill is now in my name. However, I want to thank the previous sponsor, my friend the Hon Ginny Andersen, for her work over nearly two years to get this bill to this point. I want to put on record my thanks for her earnest work in improving the safety of our children and young people in an ever-present aspect of our lives, the online world. I’d also like to thank the members of the Justice Committee, the officials from the Ministry of Justice, the Office of the Clerk, and the parliamentary counsel, who worked to support the select committee to get the bill into this stronger position. Finally, a thankyou to the submitters, who contributed to the changes found here.

Originally, the bill created two offences: digital communication with a young person under 16 with the intent to mislead, and digital communication with a young person under 16 with the intent to cause harm. However, at the select committee changes were made, and what this bill now does is to bring together those two acts into one space. It modernises our law to reflect the reality that our children live in, and, hopefully, it makes it easier to prosecute those perpetrators that prey upon our children by grooming them. This bill is designed to help ensure that our justice system can respond appropriately to protect our young people from those who engage in acts to harm young people while also maintaining in-person grooming as a crime.

As introduced, the bill focused on digital harm. The committee heard from a number of submitters who defined grooming behaviour as broad strategies to facilitate sexual contact which happens both online and in person. The committee believed that any new offences should cover digital harm as well as any other type of communication or conduct with a young person that leads to harmful, prohibited behaviour, so this bill was widened to capture both in-person and online grooming.

The committee recommended replacing clause 4 of the bill with the committee’s proposed clause 4 to insert a new section into the Act. This section would make it an offence for someone over the age of 18 to communicate by words or conduct with a person under the age of 16. Essentially, there would need to be an intention to facilitate the young person engaging or being involved in conduct that would be an offence under either Part 7 of the Crimes Act, relating to crimes against morality and decency, sexual crimes, and crimes against public welfare; or section 98AA of the Act, relating to sexual exploitation of a person.

The bill has now inserted a new offence under new section 131AB, “Grooming for sexual conduct with young person”. The ingredients of that crime include that “(a) they communicate by words or conduct with a person under 16 years (the young person); and (b) they do so intending to facilitate the young person engaging or being involved in conduct that would be an offence against this Part,” or against any of the specified paragraphs in section 98AA(1) of the Act—essentially, communicating intentionally with a person under 16 to facilitate their engagement in sexual exploitation.

New section 131AB(2) notes that “It is immaterial whether or not a response is made to the communication by the young person.” This is important because the intention to do the harm, or the attempt at the grooming online or in person, is still there, regardless of whether the young person participated further with that groomer. It’s also important that an actual, physical meeting of the victim and perpetrator does not need to happen either, and this is the modernising. The crime is complete when the ingredients in new section 131AB(1)(a) and (b) occur.

Finally, new section 131AB(3) gives us the statement that a reference to a young person also includes a constable pretending to be a young person—and this is a fictitious young person—if the offender believes that the fictitious young person is under the age of 16 years. So this is important because it’s used for when a constable is pretending to be a young person in, for example, a sting operation to catch a sexual predator. It is immaterial that that constable is not under 16; it is only that the offender believes that they are under 16.

The premeditation and planning that goes into child grooming is complex, so it’s important to have an offence that may enable an earlier intervention. Reducing or stopping harm in this way is a worthy goal, as earlier prosecutions reduce harm.

Fundamentally, this bill was drafted to support the safety of our children in the online world. I raised my children in a more benign digital world. There were very few digital platforms back then, and it was easier to monitor activity. My children weren’t gamers and smartphones didn’t exist. Now, there is a huge array of social media and methods to capture our under-16s.

Along with the substantial opportunities that the digital age brings, there also comes a diverse range of risks and harms. Digital technologies have increased the scale of sexual abuse and exploitation. Child sexual offenders have increased access to children and young persons through unprotected social media profiles and online gaming forums. The online space is an ever-changing world, both positive and negative, and this bill seeks to provide another tool for catching the child sex offender in the online context before further harm occurs.

NetSafe and the Ministry for Women conducted a survey in 2021. The survey found that seven in 10 New Zealand teenagers had experienced at least one type of unwanted digital communication within the past year, and 19 percent of those surveyed had been asked for a nude or a nearly nude image of themselves to be shared. It’s clear that we need further tools to act and protect to support our young people, and it is clear we need more modern tools to support our police force to catch those predators. This bill supports this work.

Recently, I watched a video of a non-profit group in the US. They created a social experiment where they wanted to see how long it would take a predator to approach an underage person. They created a 15-year-old persona, and, once live, that persona—it was found that it was just an hour to the first approach, and by day nine, there had been 92 separate approaches. Shockingly, almost 10 adult men per day were bombarding the fictitious 15-year-old with sexually explicit content, and they also attempted to contact the person in-person as well. Honestly, it was one of the most chilling things that I’ve ever seen.

The woman who posed as the young person said at the end of the video that she’d reflected on what she would have done if she was a child dealing with this level of online predatory messaging. She said she would have kept the abuse to herself for fear of being shamed and blamed. She would have suffered with it secretly and quietly.

Today, we take another step towards protecting those young people so that they don’t take the blame for being groomed by a predator that seeks to abuse them. This bill allows for us, as lawmakers, as parents, and as adults, to protect all of our children in this online world and to close down additional avenues to groom children.

New Zealand’s NetSafe—in my last 55 seconds—has a really useful online tool kit, and I thought that I would mention it in the context of this bill for parents to have a look at. It’s the online safety parent tool kit, a really useful tool which I recommend people look at. There are seven steps to get your family started on keeping them safe from online predators, and these steps are to understand, learn, explore, agree, teach, model, and plan.

I’m honoured to have my name on this bill, and I’m thankful for the hard world that has gone in before my contribution. I’d like to finally acknowledge those who work in the field of sexual violence and thank them very much for the hard work that they do. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a member’s bill that was introduced by Ginny Andersen MP: the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill. She introduced the bill to create a new offence in relation to grooming young people, and when we looked at it closely in the Justice Committee, it became very obvious that most of what the bill intended to capture was already covered by existing Acts: the Crimes Act and the Harmful Digital Communications Act. So the bill that we were debating in the first and second readings is much changed by the select committee process, and we now have a much more tightly focused and smaller bill which focuses on making it an offence for someone over the age of 18 to communicate by words or conduct with a person under the age of 16, but, in doing so, there needs to be an intention to facilitate the young person’s engaging or being involved in conduct that would be an offence under a couple of existing Acts around indecency, sexual crimes, and exploitation of a person. So it’s quite a narrow bill.

I’m a father of three teenage girls, and, like everybody, we’re concerned about the rise of digital crimes against young people. It is definitely a concerning trend and something that all sensible people worry about. The question before us is whether the laws of the land give sufficient coverage to dealing with the issues that young people are facing. The National Party has supported this legislation. It doesn’t do a hang of a lot, but it does bring in one little area of extra coverage, and in so far as it does that, to keep our younger people safe from predation, we support it.

The only point I would make in passing, and not wanting to prolong this debate lengthily, is that there was a change. Originally, the bill as introduced was extending jail time penalties from five years to seven years for a section in relation to these crimes, and I did make the point in a previous speech—and I’ll make the point again—about how kind of odd that seemed. This is a Government that has focused on reducing the prison population and at every turn we see people having short periods of home detention after violent assaults and crimes, and yet we have legislation introducing seven-year prison sentences. I suppose it’s not the legislation and the sentences listed that matter; it’s what actually happens to keep the community safe. It just seemed a slightly odd and dissonant approach from the Government to on the one hand be very focused on reducing prison sentences and the amount of time people spend in prison, but to also be passing a bill that was extending so-called prison sentences for this particular group.

I think what we do need to see is a little bit more consistency on that issue, and our focus when it comes to law and order on this side of the House is community safety being the primary object. If the incidence of crime continues to grow as it has in the last few months, particularly in serious crime and ram raids and things like that—if that’s the case, then we need to deal with it firmly and with always a focus on keeping the community safe.

But, overall, this legislation creates a new offence and deals with a particular area of digital crime. It seeks to close one area to keep our younger people just that little bit safer, and in so far as it does that, we support it. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I just rise in support of my colleague Angie Warren-Clark, who has put her name to this really important bill which seeks to create more protections for our young people in the digital space.

We have a history, on this side of the House, where there are a few champions of women’s causes who have put through members’ bills that pertain particularly to the digital space. I’m reminded of a bill by our former colleague Louisa Wall which looked at protecting young women. We’ve also had other bills in this area, and I believe that this bill, now under the name of Angie Warren-Clark, really extends those protections.

So I just want to commend my colleague for taking on this work. I want to thank her also for the work that she is doing, wearing another hat, which also has a kaupapa for protecting women’s reproductive health, actually, with the New Zealand Parliamentarians’ Group on Population and Development, or the NZPPD. We had a really good meeting this evening, and we know that working across the House on these types of issues is what makes progress. So it’s good to see the discussions happening.

It’s good to see that the legislation is attempting to keep up with the digital environment. It’s very difficult because technologies change all the time, but this is one way of doing it. So it’s great to see support from, I presume, around the House, and I really want to commend my colleague Angie for taking on this important kaupapa. I commend the bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’ll take a brief call this evening because, importantly, my colleague the Hon Paul Goldsmith, who does sit on the Justice Committee, has addressed the House. The National Party does support this bill, and in my spokesperson role for children, it’s actually complementary that I do make some comments—brief comments albeit—on the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill, which is being supported, it would appear, unanimously by the House this evening at this third reading.

I remember that former colleague Louisa Wall had introduced to this House on 2 July 2020 the Harmful Digital Communications (Unauthorised Posting of Intimate Visual Recording) Amendment Bill, and when we had the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill, which is before the House this evening, I do recall speaking in the House and signalling and indicating that, in fact, Louisa Wall’s bill addressed a significant proportion of what was in the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill. In reading the Justice Committee’s report, it’s interesting to note that a good part of the amendment bill that I am speaking to this evening has actually been deleted, and that is in reference to the fact that the concerns associated with digital communications with a young person under 16 with intent to mislead and also with intent to cause harm has been addressed within the Crimes Act and also within the bill passed into law, the harmful digital communications amendment bill.

So, in short, the bill now before the House is in a considerably amended form compared with that which was introduced, heeding and cognisant the Crimes Act does in fact address the concerns. But the amendment now before the House under this bill aligns with the Crimes Act and also Louisa’s bill—now law—to make it consistent.

Also, just for the sake of clarity before concluding, there was mention that was made by the previous speaker that the harmful digital communications amendment bill, or the reference to that, was specifically addressing crimes against women. It’s actually not specifically addressing crimes against women, although it’s indicated that victims may be women or others, because under the Harmful Digital Communications Act, it states that the person commits an offence knowing that the individual who was the subject of the recording has not expressly consented. So I thought it was really quite pertinent to clarify that, yes, women are victims, but victims are not only singularly women per se.

In concluding, it’s really very appropriate in my role as spokesperson for children that this bill, the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill, is passed into law.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s wonderful to get an opportunity to speak on this bill tonight, unexpectedly, so here I am.

I rise in support of the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill at its third reading. First of all, I would like to start off by thanking my colleagues from the Justice Committee for all their hard mahi in considering this bill, as well as everyone who has provided a submission. I was not part of the select committee when this bill went through the committee, but I have followed the debate on this very important bill.

I would also like to acknowledge the member Ginny Andersen for her work on this bill, and Angie Warren-Clark for taking on the bill and shepherding it through the House. Ginny Andersen was, of course, also the chair of the Justice Committee, and I know there were quite a lot of technical parts to the bill that the select committee had to work their way through.

It is a really important bill because it will make the world safer for our kids. As a parent—and I’m sure everybody else is in the same situation—with the extent of social media and electronic communications, it is a little bit of a worry about what our kids are exposed to. So what this bill does is it builds on the work of the Government to protect kids online, including ongoing work to design a modern, flexible, and coherent content regulatory framework as announced by the Minister of Internal Affairs in June 2021.

The Harmful Digital Communications (Unauthorised Posting of Intimate Visual Recording) Amendment Bill received its Royal assent in March 2022, and what that bill did was it made it an offence to post intimate visual recordings without the consent of the person in the recording. The change aims to improve access to justice for victims and survivors of image-based sexual abuse.

The Government has also funded the Keeping It Real Online campaign, and that was created and launched in response to the increased online risk of harm to children and young people who were spending more time online, of course, during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Now, what we’re doing as a Government is we’re working harder and smarter to keep our communities safe, break the cycle of offending, and tackle the root causes of crime. What the bill does is it strengthens existing legislation, which is really important because it will better protect children from harm.

So, to keep things concise, we support this bill because it will protect New Zealand children from harm, and that’s especially important as the popularity of online platforms increases amongst our young people, and with that, of course, the opportunity for people to cause young people harm. As the popularity of online platforms increases, so too does the incidence of harm, in particular harm experienced by young people. I do remember that during the second reading, the member Mark Mitchell was recalling some stories of his daughter experiencing some online harm and abuse, and saying how he saw this legislation as an opportunity for younger people to be safer in that particular forum.

There have been some other research and surveys conducted. For example, a survey in partnership between Netsafe and the Ministry for Women found that the experiences of teenagers with online harm was that about seven in 10 teens have actually experienced at least one type of unwanted digital communication in the past year. It also found that almost 19 percent of teens surveyed experienced an unwanted digital communication that had had a negative effect on their daily activities, the most common of which involve being contacted by a stranger.

Following the select committee process, the Justice Committee decided that any new offences should cover digital harm as well as any other type of communication or conduct with a person that leads to harmful prohibited behaviour. We’ve heard from previous speakers what the bill does. It is inserting new section 131AB into the Act, making it an offence for someone over the age of 18 to communicate by words or conduct with a person under the age of 16, so I won’t go into those amendments any further.

I’d just say that this was a complex piece that the select committee had to work its way through and they it did very well, making the world a little bit safer, as online harm has become a growing issue over the last years with the rise of social media. This bill will do an excellent job of addressing it and putting a stop to it, and it will keep our children safe, so I commend it to the House. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I do rise, as I think others have done throughout today and tonight, by first acknowledging that it is the anniversary of March 15, the terror attacks in Christchurch, and our thoughts are with the victims of that attack and also with our Muslim community around Aotearoa.

I rise to support this bill. I congratulate both the Hon Ginny Andersen and my friend Angie Warren-Clark for bringing it to the House and shepherding it through, and also the members of the Justice Committee. It sounds like it was a complex and engaged committee process that has resulted, as we can all see, in improvements.

This is a piece of legislation that will make the world a little safer, and I think it is a bit overdue in terms of the recognition that we all—including young people—live a great deal of our lives in online spaces now. The harm that happens in the so-called real world can often be either started in online spaces, exasperated by online lives, or actually can happen in online spaces itself, as can sexual offences against children. So to have a freestanding offence will help the courts and it will help young people and it will help the service providers and others who support our communities to both prevent and also restore and—in terms of the offenders—rehabilitate.

Currently, before this legislation passes, our courts for years and years have been dealing with what’s called grooming-type offences as an aggravating factor of child sexual offending once it has happened and has escalated to a point that the Crimes Act actually then kicks in. This piece of legislation will mean that we can start that work before more serious harm happens—before children are interfered with or violated in far more serious ways. So to mislead a young person with the intent to subsequently have arranged meetings or to, essentially, hide or lie about the age or identity of the offender—it feels like we’ve known about this for so, so long, and that’s why I say that this is a piece of legislation that is almost overdue.

But it’s great that it is, in fact, coming to the House, and it also is great to see us recognise the types of harms that young people do suffer as a result of this type of offending. So to gain a young person’s trust, to coerce them, and to silence them—these are all things that we’ve known happen in terms of child sexual offending, which, more often than not thus far, has happened at the hands of people that children have known in their lives. But it is being replicated in a way where a child gets to know the person in online spaces, and the coercion, the silencing, and the trust-building can happen in online spaces in just the same way as we’ve always known it happens in the home.

I hope that this is the beginning of our House of Representatives and us, as lawmakers, recognising all the different types of harm that can happen in online spaces from things like revenge porn and identity theft to hate speech and extremism. But to say also that this piece of legislation is only the legislative part of what we need to support young people to be safe from harm in online spaces—we need a lot more education, a lot more community-based support, consent education, standardised sex education in our schools, which we currently don’t have, to recognise that young people need to be empowered to protect themselves and to be safe as part of our communities, with the kind of respect and trust that we all deserve. So I commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora e te Māngai o te Whare. I was a member of Justice Committee, which has worked through this bill, and so it is with great pleasure I stand. I remember our colleague the Hon Ginny Andersen, who came to us originally with this bill, and I honour the lovely woman Angie Warren-Clark, who has taken it on most appropriately, given her history of advocacy in this space. It couldn’t have been a better switch from one wahine toa in the sexual violence and defence of the vulnerable to another.

I think it’s probably best for me if I just do a very, very quick recap of what this bill is about. Essentially, as I understand it, Ms Andersen came to the realisation that there was a hole in the legislation, so we’ve got this gap where you’ve got an offence in the Crimes Act, in section 131A or section 131B—I can’t remember, but it’s one of them—which says that if you groom a young person under 16 and then you travel to meet them, or you get them to travel to meet you, with the intention of doing something nefarious in the sexual offence arena, then that is an offence punishable by imprisonment for up to seven years. The problem is: what about the person who is grooming someone in the online space and never makes that step to arrange travel—what if there is just this ongoing pattern of grooming?

I think Ms Andersen was particularly struck by a case in which a teacher—and it was publicised at the time—had sent hundreds of text messages to a child with fairly disastrous consequences, but nothing had happened between them other than these texts. So she wanted to cover that space. However, what we realised when we dug into that and when we heard from the submitters was that grooming isn’t just an online behaviour, but grooming is a behaviour that takes place—and, in fact, the studies show it takes place—in most sexual offending. An offender will groom not just the child but also their family and their teachers to allow them access to the child, then they groom them to trust them, and then they groom them to accept inappropriate sexual behaviours incrementally until they get there. This behaviour happens around our community.

So Ms Andersen wanted to expand the bill, and that’s where we came to the current space. So the current bill still doesn’t require the actual travel, but if you show intention through communications of any sort—online or in the real world—to facilitate sexual inappropriate conduct with someone under 16, then you’re a goner.

We also adjusted a few things around the penalty, because the section 131 that we have—the one with the travel component to the grooming—has a seven-year penalty. This is a lesser offence. It doesn’t go as far as starting to activate the offence. So we have brought that back to be commensurate with the harmful digital communications and that sort of an offence there, which also doesn’t involve the actualisation of it beyond the sending of the inappropriate messages. We’ve brought it back to the current, three-year penalty.

Grooming is insidious. It is pervasive. It not only enables the offending but also helps the person to cover it up, because they generally persuade the child that they’re in some sort of affectionate relationship, so the child feels too guilty, they feel too complicit, and they feel too responsible for the ongoing happiness of the offender.

Then when you get them to court, of course, the grooming helps again, because in society, we believe that sex offending is something that is done at force and that someone is pinned to the ground and they fight and they hate the offender, and they run to the first person and they scream, “Help, help—I’ve been raped!” It’s actually called the hue and cry. If you are groomed, you don’t do any of that, so it feeds into the myth that this can’t be real rape.

So grooming is three times insidiously horrible: one, it facilitates abuse; two, it enables the hiding of it, because you persuade the victim not to tell; and, three, if the victim does tell, it destroys their credibility in front of the court and in front of the jury.

This is a well worthwhile little piece of legislation. It fills a gap in the legislation. I’m not saying it’s going to be used in every sex offence. As a prosecutor, I think it will become not a stand-alone offence, but an adjunct to other offending where you can also prove grooming, and I think it is one of the very few offences—very quickly, before the House closes, Madam Speaker—where it may actually have a deterrent effect, because sex offenders, like white-collar criminals but unlike most other offenders, plan their offending. They think very carefully and they are incredibly strategic in who they target.

This sort of offence may just—may just—deter behaviour that causes tremendous harm in our community. I commend this bill to the House.

This debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow. Thank you.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.