NZ’s Women’s Refuges and Rape Crisis Centres are for any Tom, Dick, and Mary.

And it seems their finances improve alongside Tom and Dick.

Once, New Zealand’s Women’s Refuge took in traumatised women in need of a sanctuary from abuse. Most of that abuse was at the hands of men. Now, Women’s Refuge takes in men, too.

All it took for that to happen was for an unholy decision to be made, by those at the helm of Women’s Refuge, that the word ‘woman’ could mean anything that anyone wanted it to mean. Men said thank you very much, knocked on the refuge doors, and were assiduously attended to.

And to get the inevitable “whatabout” out of the way, yes, men can get abused and need a safe place to go, too, but that place is not a women’s refuge. Men are quite capable of organising those places for themselves.

It was tough going to get women’s refuges established. One of the numerous reasons for that, was there were both men and women who didn’t believe women should be able to get away from abusive husbands. Funding never flowed too freely for the refuges, either, although in an interview in March 2023, Dr Ang Jury, CEO of the NZ National Network of Independent Women’s Refuges, reportedly said their finances were in good shape. Perhaps they improved alongside allowing men in?

A couple of weeks after that post by Broadsheet, in response to a Fair Play For Women article they posted again about Women’s Refuge’s decision to let men in -

It prompted a Broadsheet follower, Dr Carol Hamilton¹, to relay how she’d drawn some parallels between the recent(ish) scandal at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, who’d employed a man as CEO because he said he was a woman, and then proceeded to insert trans ideology into their systems; and a ruckus a few years before that at the Dunedin Rape Crisis Centre, over what appeared to be an insertion of trans ideology there, too.

Fun fact - Dunedin is known colloquially as ‘the Edinburgh of the South’, because ‘Dunedin’ is apparently an old Gaelic version of the name ‘Edinburgh’.

Anyway, Carol wrote an opinion piece² about the parallels she could see between events at the Rape Crisis Centres in the two cities, and submitted it as a proposal for publication to The Listener magazine in June 2024. Their reply was “Kia ora Carol, Sorry, this one is not for us.”. She posted screenshots of that piece in the comments section under Broadsheet’s post, and unlike The Listener, a bloke by the name of Bill Clark thought Carol’s piece was definitely for him. Well, it was for him to correct her, that was.

An exchange followed between Carol and Bill. Bill, it seems, is or was involved in Dunedin’s Rape Crisis Centre, now called OCASA (Ōtepoti [Dunedin] Collective Against Sexual Abuse), although its legal title remains Rape Crisis Dunedin Incorporated. It began calling itself OCASA back in 2019 to “work with all genders”.

Bill proceeded to use language in his comments in the same ‘unique’ way that transactivists also do. He refers to OCASA as having needed to be liberated from “gender ideology”, by which I suspect he means liberating it from being a single-sex service only for women. Correct use of language isn’t much of a priority for those who prioritise “all genders” over women. Although he sprinkles his comments with the odd ‘women’, that word also appears to be used in the manner of his and OCASA’s transactivist-aligned vernacular, meaning any Tom, Dick, or Mary who says they are one.

The McNeilly who gets a mention in one of Bill’s comments is Hamish McNeilly, who tried to get to the bottom of the Dunedin Rape Crisis mess back in 2022, and gives the impression it was no easy task.³ Despite the centre being described as a “toxic” place to work⁴, its finances had become notably healthier by the time of his writing, and after welcoming “all genders”.³

Bill did not reply to Carol’s request for confirmation that the Dunedin Rape Crisis Centre – OCASA – was now for all-comers, and no longer a women-only service in the true meaning of the word ‘women’, and not in the transactivist meaning. However, it’s pretty clear from Bill’s comments that women no longer have a single-sex Rape Crisis Centre in Dunedin, and no amount of obfuscation from him hides that.

Nor is there a women-only Women’s Refuge in Dunedin anymore, either. That’s now called ‘Ōtepoti Dunedin Whānau Refuge’. Seeing as ‘whanau’ is the Māori word for ‘family’, I’m picking that this gobbledygook-named organisation is also for every Tom, Dick, and Mary. I would hazard a guess that many others Rape Crisis Centres and Women’s Refuges in NZ besides Dunedin have also adopted convoluted names, and opened their doors to anyone who says they’re a woman. Not just their doors, their wallets, too. Some Women’s Refuges will send the men who turn up at their door to a motel room, at the Refuge’s expense.

As an aside, if you’re not entirely sure what the difference is between a Rape Crisis Centre and a Women’s Refuge, I asked someone in the know and this is what they said: “Rape Crisis only focuses on sexual harm and sexual violence. Women’s Refuges may have women who have been sexually abused there, but not acute victims. I don’t think we have women-only rape crisis services in New Zealand anymore. From memory, Dunedin’s Rape Crisis Centre tried to fight this, but eventually folded”. This person dropped Dunedin in their explanation with no nudging from me to do so. I guess the ruckus there was felt and heard widely.

So, what is the effect on women of allowing men into what should be women-only safe places? The women who use them are hardly in a position to make articulate and well-reasoned complaints about it, and if some women just stay away, how does their absence get measured? For the organisations which send the men who turn up at their doors to motel rooms, perhaps the only trauma is to the money which is meant to be spent on women. For those that don’t send the men elsewhere, the women may simply capitulate to the men’s presence, due to having no other options. As we know, however, capitulation can’t be assumed to be consent, and, cruelly, may add to the women’s trauma.

This current travesty of mixing women and men together in Rape Crisis Centres and Women’s Refuges, and creating byzantine names as the method of changing their ethos, means that there are no Rape Crisis Centres and Women’s Refuges only for women in New Zealand anymore. If any do actually remain, I expect they have to guard that secret very well, indeed.

Gender ideology - used in its true meaning, not in Bill’s meaning – changed things for women, and not for the better. In the words of the opening paragraph in the afore-mentioned Fair Play For Women article “A woman’s trauma response doesn’t care how someone identifies. A woman who has had a male towering over and threatening her, been battered by a male fist, been throttled by a male grip or humiliated by a male voice, knows exactly who is male and who is female. Her survival depends on it”.

What will it take for the current crop of duped women to realise that “all genders” and “identifies as” are not the gifts to women they’re packaged up to be? There may be something in that package for women and girls, like the sexual revolution had, but the greatest gift in it has been crafted by and for men. Whether or not all men partake of that gift, it’s there for their taking.

• ¹Brief bio for Dr Carol Hamilton

My PhD research investigated how sexuality issues for people with learning disabilities were being supported by workers in the care homes they lived in. The thesis ‘in our house we're not terribly sexual' can be accessed through Massey University at https://mro.massey.ac.nz/items/a4b80534-f526-4e93-93d5-66ec59ea9cba

As a Maric Curie postdoc Fellow at Trinity College in Ireland I worked for two years on the ‘A Story To Tell’ lifestory project, gathering accounts from people with learning disabilities who had been in institutions in the Republic

I also worked with beginning teachers in the area of ethical issues and inclusive practices. All publications can be found at https://rkusott.academia.edu/CarolHamilton

• ² Notes on a Case of Constructive Dismissal – can any New Zealand rape crisis centre workers relate?

The Listener Opinion

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• ³ "I came away thinking . . . what have I done"

• ⁴Dunedin's Rape Crisis accused of being a 'toxic' place to work

Header photo by Yasin Arıbuğa on Unsplash