Search Results

By Darcy Lawrey (he/him) The day I interviewed Aidan Donoghue, the 2026 VUWSA president, he was already getting stuck into the job addressing VicCom, the commerce students’ society. I sat down with him in VUWSA’s long-forgotten Pipitea office to hear how he got to where he is, and what his plans are for VUWSA. Donoghue grew up in Rotorua, where he was the Head Boy at Fraser High School. On the very last day of year 13 he was selected as the youth MP for Gaurav Sharma, the Labour MP who was expelled from Labour following allegations of bullying; Aiden’s first foray into the political world. He recalls being hounded by a journalist for comment on the MP’s behaviour. After college, Donoghue headed south for Wellington to study at VUW with his now fiancé, who he met working at McDonalds at age 15. He gives major credit to his friend William Bell-Purchas, the VUW Student Board Representative for getting him stuck into politics here in the capital. In 2022 he unionised his workplace, the Taranaki Street McDonalds, which saw him negotiating a collective agreement with the Auckland head office. That led to a job at the Council of Trade Unions working on fair pay agreements, and then one at NZEI, the primary school teacher’s union. Last year he became the Engagement Vice President at VUWSA, his second time running for the role. This year, he’s got the top job.  He’s both very proud of his win, and of the massive increase in engagement VUWSA has seen this year. “I’m still reeling from it, it still hasn’t really sunk in yet,” he said.   Donoghue believes that VUWSA has the power to be an economic driver of change within Wellington. As an organisation that represents roughly 10% of Wellington’s population, he believes VUWSA has the numbers to throw its weight around when it comes to setting affordable prices for things like rubbish bags.  His primary focus for VUWSA this year is providing increased and improved services for Students. But he’s still keen for VUWSA to keep up its political campaigning, which he thinks will be bolstered by VUWSA engaging more with students through services on campus. “Politically, the key thing I want to stress is that the student vote is not guaranteed”, he says. “I want to see specific policies from any side of the table which address student concerns.” He brings the spirit of labour organising to the role. If he could change one law, he’d make union membership opt-out, instead of opt-in. He’s big on community, and says the number one change he wants to make on campus is providing more third spaces and opportunities for students to connect: “More services, more interaction, and just more bang for your buck for student services”. Donoghue struggles to pick a favourite campus, as studying taxation had him at Pipitea most of the time during his undergraduate study, but he says the food options at Kelburn gives it the edge. You’ll find him most days enjoying a cheese scone at The Lab.

By Darcy Lawrey (he/him) VUWSA’s election last month saw a massive jump in candidates. It was the first time more than one person ran for President since Tamatha Paul, now the MP for Wellington Central, won in 2018. It wasn’t just a two-horse race either; five candidates contested the role. The increase in competition saw a corresponding surge in complaints about the conduct of candidates.  Matt Tucker, VUWSA CEO, says 17 complaints were made. The last time any substantial complaints were made about candidates in VUWSA’s election was also in 2018. He says roughly half of the complaints this year were made by current members of the VUWSA exec.  VUWSA’s election rules try to prevent any unfair advantage incumbent candidates might get through their public roles. Restrictions are placed on what incumbent candidates can do during the two-week election period, including a ban on appearing in VUWSA’s social media, or in Salient . Tucker says the rules are “quite open, and [are] about transparency and fairness.” The Returning Officer, who is responsible for the election results, has some discretion in how they are applied.  Complaints against two candidates were upheld, both of whom were incumbent candidates. One was made against Presidential candidate Josh Robinson for using a VUWSA sound system to throw a campaign flat party. The other was against Welfare Vice-President candidate, Aspen Jackman, for an unapproved appearance in a Salient  article, once the election period had started.  Jackman, this year’s Equity Officer, was re-elected as VUWSA’s Welfare Vice President for 2026. Her vote total was reduced by 2% for her appearance in a Salient article, titled: Women in the Arts . While she thinks it’s fair to make a complaint, she’s “upset” that her votes were reduced “partially because it detracts from the writing in Salient .” She was not aware that she required clearance to appear in the article. She believes some rules need changing, particularly when it comes to posters. VUWSA prints off 100 posters each for all candidates, but she says some candidates put up “hundreds” of posters. University staff had also made complaints to Tucker about the sheer number of posters plastered across the campuses. Other behaviour which drew complaints included: a candidate displaying their campaign poster on the information display in The Hub; a candidate handing out cake as a “bribe” for votes, and; concerns that candidates were spending over the spending cap of $100. It is too soon to say if this year's historic VUWSA election will also end in the House of Representatives; we can say that democracy is back, and it’s scrappy.

Dan Moskovitz (he/him) The future of postgraduate representation at the university remains unclear, with a funding cut to the Post Graduate Student Association (PGSA) for 2026, and VUWSA’s attempt to step in stymied.  The PGSA has struggled for a while now. The organization has little funding and is reliant on volunteers, meaning its ability to provide steady services year on year is limited.   Furthermore, the PGSA focuses primarily on community building, which has come at some expense to its advocacy role. Positions on various boards for postgraduate representatives have experienced ongoing vacancies. This means certain post-graduate course reviews, for example, have no student representation.  VUWSA, who represent undergraduates on these boards, wanted to step in to fill the void. VUWSA wanted funding—through the student service levy—for a Postgraduate Officer on the executive, and a staff member to support them. Unfortunately for VUWSA, the Student Levy Advisory Committee decided to only fund VUWSA’s executive member, who would work 15 hours a week. PGSA Vice-President Events Vladislav Ilin was unimpressed by the decision to only fund an executive member.  “If that person gets busy with their Ph.D or masters, then the position might not be as effective than if you had someone working full time [on postgraduate representation] with KPIs to hit.” To make matters worse, the position ultimately went unfilled during VUWSA’s executive elections. VUWSA CEO Matt Tucker says VUWSA has options, including holding a by-election next year for the position, or hiring someone to work as the Postgraduate Officer without executive voting rights. PGSA meanwhile, also sought $68,000 from the Student Levy Advisory Committee to continue their community building while hiring staff to support their executive, and to reduce their reliance on volunteers. They got $15,000.  “They underfund us, and volunteers run out of energy and steam. When that happens, PGSA fails, and there’s no one to represent postgrads” said Ilin.  “And so the funding gets cut further.” Illin and his fellow PGSA Vice-President Mariel Lettier think PGSA could only fund one event each month next year, after admin costs are factored in. This raises the question; how important is community building?  Both Tucker and Lettier agree that for postgraduates, it’s vital. Postgraduates are predominantly older, foreign, and lack connections in Wellington. If you’re doing your Ph.D as an immigrant in your forties, then there’s not a whole lot of common ground between you and a 19-year-old undergrad from Wellington. Tucker meanwhile notes how universities like Cambridge and Havard are renowned for their postgraduate culture outside of the classroom.   All of this leaves postgraduate representation in a state of limbo. VUWSA has some—but not an ideal amount—of funding for it, but no staff, exec or otherwise. PGSA’s community building will be happening at a reduced rate. The resulting situation is one no one is happy with.  “I’m not sure if what’s happened is necessarily better than the status quo,” said Tucker. “Because with PGSA’s funding cut, they may not choose to do certain things.” “If they don’t, who will?"

A dove wisp daydream –  in the reflective space   of sweat and tears.   A strand of hair tied   around your pinkie toe   murmurs "hello it’s me".     The humidity of daylight   grasped in his palm.  Entangled in our conversations,    there is something worth saying.     You are radiation captured   in my dreamcatcher.  Entrapped in my fine vase   stolen, meshed in    memory fibres ––  too personal to recount.       You are the mystery   under my bra-strap,  the gaps in a tattoo  and reality in a sun flare —  the space the sun skips.       Years spent indulging   in eyes and lips, sleeping on   dove-feathered cream piles,    palms indented with tightly    pressed fingernails.      You are like shattered glass   under my tongue, and I chew.      Klimt-like in love  it becomes mosaic.    Everything we have done  and will do.

Shay McEwan (Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Ngāti Pāhauwera, Ngāti Porou) As we head into the final stretch of classes for trimester two, I wanted to take a moment to pause and reflect on how the year has been. Initially I thought it would be a fun idea to speak on my own experiences. Instead, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by a wonderful bunch of tauira in the wharekai of Ngā Mokopuna. While sitting down with them, I was able to ask about their experiences, how the year has been for them, what they’re looking forward to over the break, and what excites them about the year to come.  I spoke with: Rawinia , first-year Laws and Māori Studies Tui , first-year Political Communications  Hinewairua , second-year Māori Studies and Intercultural Communications  Sophia , third-year Māori Psychology  Kaitlyn , fifth-year Honours Sociology  How has this year been? For Rawinia, who moved here from Tāmaki-Makaurau to start her first year of Law and Māori studies, she mentioned the year has been “good, super eventful”. Uni life can be challenging for many, but she highlighted the importance of being social and making connections to help her through this year.  Tui, another wonderful first year, described it as “very much treading water.” This is how first year students can often feel—the constant juggling of assignments, while trying to keep your head above it all. Still, she admitted it’s “pretty cruisy compared to high school and having a job”.  In her final year of Honours, Kaitlyn kept it real while commenting on Tui’s view of the year by agreeing with the statement, saying “Me too, it’s definitely like I’m still treading water”.  Sophia, now in her third year, reflected on the growth she’s had this year. “I’ve got a better grasp on balancing work and uni this year, and I feel so much more confident in myself and especially in Māori spaces. I’ve put myself out there a lot more than last year, I’m thankful and feel at peace—socially, at least.” For her, the community within the Pā has been central to how supported and connected she feels to her fellow Māori tauira.  “Long but eventful,” is how Hinewairua put it. She agreed with the others that social connection really helped her through the year, stating that “without my friends, it’d be boring but I’m glad for the experiences I had this year”.  What are you looking forward to over the break? After months and months of lectures, deadlines, and readings, everyone was in agreement about resetting themselves and taking time for whānau and friends.  Tui said the break is about “resetting and getting mentally prepared for the following year.” For Rawinia, it’s all about “taking a mental break, I want to have time for myself again”. She’s also excited about heading up to Gisborne to see her māmā; once she’s back she’s moving into a new flat with her best friends. “I’m finally going to have time to myself without feeling super guilty about being on TikTok as well!” Sophia wants to spend her summer nurturing her soul with raranga, art, and all the “things I love doing but always run out of time for during the trimester.” She also mentioned going home far North, and spending proper quality time with her whānau.  And for our lovely Miss Honours Student, Kaitlyn has one very clear goal for her break “I’m excited to close Zotero.” Iykyk!  What about next year? With the exhaustion of the current year still very fresh, all tauira spoke about what’s on their minds for next year and what’s motivating them to keep moving forward.  For Hinewairua, the finish line is within reach: “Next year, I’ll be closer to getting my degree, my final year.”  Tui hopes to be “more involved in my community: I really want to keep that connection I have this year, and I hope to dive into it more next year.”  Rawinia is focused on getting herself into her second year of law (she definitely will!)  Sophia has her eyes set on both studies and community. “A successful final year of my bachelor’s, I also really want to serve our tauira Māori in any way that I can, representing them and giving back to the community that has carried me through this degree.”  Kaitlyn on the other hand, she can see the moment clearly “I’m going to be walking across that Ātea and getting my degree.”  What I loved the most about sitting with them was their combined sense of hope for the year ahead and their mix of honesty, and humour. While they agreed they’ve been in survival mode the last couple months, they shared the amount of growth they’ve experienced. All of them reminded me that the experiences we have as students aren’t  just about classes or grades; they are about the unique experience we have as Māori students, and how we find strength in each other, in our whānau, and the spaces we have on campus.  As this year closes, I feel lucky to have gained a close friendship with these girls throughout the year, but also lucky to have listened to their journeys. Even though this year is wrapping, for our tauira Māori and all of us, while this chapter closes, the next chapter is only just beginning.

TW: Violence Against Women, Domestic Violence There’s this opinion piece I’ve had in my mind for a while; since starting back at Salient  really. But I’ve been hesitant. What does it mean to beat a dead horse? What does it mean to consistently see men in our headlines, when according to the UN, one woman or girl is killed every ten minutes by an intimate partner or family member? The trigger for this was small: a few days ago, YouTube took down an AI channel which uploaded nothing but hyperrealistic videos of women, first begging for their lives, and then being shot. The channel had over a thousand subscribers. The videos were made with Google’s new AI software that was supposed to be safeguarded, but women’s suffering slipped under the radar. On June 14, 2025, Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated in a shooting at her home in Brooklyn Park. Not a random act, but part of a planned attack targeting Democratic legislators.  On February 8, 2025, NDTV reported that nearly 100 women were enslaved in Georgia, tricked into what they thought were surrogacy jobs. Instead, they were injected with hormones, anesthetised, and had their eggs harvested once a month, their bodies treated as warehouses for profit. A “farm.” A farm of women. What unites these stories—the politician killed in her kitchen, the women wired into egg-extraction machines, the AI avatars executed for clicks—isn’t simply violence. It is the sense that women’s worth is endlessly negotiable. That our suffering is a currency: traded for views, votes, profits. It is easy to tell ourselves these are outliers. America has its gun problem. Georgia has its mafia problem. The internet has its radical weirdos. But what is the common denominator? That women, when reduced to symbols, are infinitely expendable. And what about here, in Aotearoa? We have our own ledger. We average one woman a month killed by a current or former partner. Our Family Court is so clogged that survivors wait years for basic protections. We had the Roast Busters scandal; we had Grace Millane’s murder turned into a pornography of trial detail. Every country finds its own flavour of the same pattern. We like to call ourselves world leaders in gender equity. In 1893 we became the first country in the world to give women the vote; we put Jacinda Ardern on international magazine covers. But what is the worth of a woman’s life here, when Māori women are three times more likely than pākehā to be killed by an intimate partner? When frontline women’s refuges operate on bake-sale budgets while Corrections pours millions into prison expansions? When a violent man can be bailed to the same street as his victim because there’s “nowhere else to put him”? So when I ask “What is our worth?” I don’t mean as individuals—your mother, your girlfriend, your flatmate. I mean systemically. What is the value of a woman’s life, when companies can profit from making fake snuff porn of us, when gangs can extract our eggs like battery hens, when politicians are targeted and receive almost no media attention? Worth is not abstract. It is measured in clicks, in court delays, in the speed of a police response. It is measured in the difference between how quickly Meta will pull down copyright infringement versus how slowly it removes videos of abuse. It is measured in the fact that Google can create AI capable of faking executions, but not one capable of spotting misogyny. I keep circling back to politeness. The machinery of disbelief is greased by it. We excuse, we downplay, we say “this isn’t who we are.” And yet it is. It is who we are until we choose otherwise. Until women’s deaths and degradations are not just tragedies, but national emergencies. Until tech companies, courts, and parliaments are made to answer not just for their oversights, but for the premise they operate on: that women’s lives are optional margins in the spreadsheet. What is our worth? If you take the headlines at face value, it is less than a vote, less than an ad impression, less than a clutch of harvested eggs. The only way to shift that balance is relentless attention. Refusing to let the horror pass as background noise. Naming it, over and over, until the cost of ignoring it outweighs the cost of change. Because the dead horse is not dead. It is us. And every day, the world tells us what it thinks we’re worth. The only question is whether we keep agreeing.

Column by ISO Socialism can be a suspicious kind of politics. You’ll often find someone trailing the money, or exposing some hidden violence. The real story always lies below the surface. This skepticism, for the most part, is a vital step. Capitalism has a monopoly over schooling, communication channels, and ‘legitimate’ politics; it can easily control the narrative. When Luxon says he wants ‘peace’ in Palestine, why would we take this at face value? Professor Michelle Murphy proposes the term unsettling for this critical approach: a word that suggests challenging what’s comfortable, shaking loose what’s sedimented, and undoing what’s been colonised. It’s a close resemblance to intifada : an awakening or anti-colonial upheaval. For the past few years, we have seen just how necessary such an upheaval has become;  social progress is not assured, and the rules are not made to protect ordinary people. Those in power can overturn abortion rights, ignore Te Tiriti, commit genocide, and turn fascist. Everything can turn to shit in an instant. As the activist-scholar Gargi Bhattacharyya puts it, revolutionary politics are for everyone who has been heartbroken again and again by this system and sees “that there is no remedy, no repair, no way back and nothing to fix this. That whatever comes next these histories and presents of violence cannot be put right.” This heartbreak is our starting point. It’s one in which we care deeply about the world, and make no excuse for injustice. And yet, it has limits. What use is exposure and discomfort when a genocide is being livestreamed before our eyes, and US troops are deployed to intimidate citizens on the street? This violence is not hidden, but placed on display. The open visibility tries to send a message that certain people are disposable and resistance is not worth the risk. Here, heartbreak can lead easily to despair. What’s needed is not just tearing down, but instilling a new set of values and relationships. This was the success of Student Justice for Palestine’s brilliant campaign which resulted in the Academic Board adopting a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions policy. Much more than a removal of funds or refusal of collaboration, it forged new lines of solidarity between staff and students, and created new expectations for our university—and hopefully others—moving forward. Over the next few years, there will be more work for us to do: getting the university to divest from fossil fuels (shout out Climate Action and Resistance VUW), setting up pathways for Palestinian scholars, and resisting any further cuts to our education. Getting involved will not be a cure for heartbreak, but it will be the minimum for realising change. Thanks to everyone who read our column this year, to Salient for allowing us to write each week, and to everyone involved in making this university a better place. If you would like to follow us from here, or join our mahi, you can find us at @vuwsocialists. The title of this piece comes from the first line of Ngā Taurahere , a te reo translation of The Internationale by ISO members Kaakatarau Te Pou Kohere (Ngāti Porou, Ngāi Tuhoe, Ngāti te ata Waiohua, Kai Tahu) and Tima Thurlow (Ngāi Tuhoe).

TW: Medical Neglect, Graphic Content There’s a photograph I can’t stop seeing: A small house in Illinois, 1938. A woman, Catherine Donohue, is propped against pillows, her profile pared down by illness until she seems almost to float. Beside her, her husband sits with the dogged neatness of grief—hands folded, shoulders square. A commissioner, pen in hand, leans forward with the anxious impatience of a guest who knows the furniture was not built for cross-examination. And Catherine, queenly even in a cotton nightgown, gives testimony that does not belong to the room at all. It is meant for posterity. Her words: It is too late for me, but not for you. That sentence is the hinge of this story and also the keel, the thing that lets it move through time without capsizing. It is why I cannot tell this as a brief or a timeline or a stoic list of holdings and citations. It must be a room, with a woman in it; it must be a room we can walk into, and a room we agree not to leave the moment we feel uncomfortable. It must be a room where we promise, aloud, that we see them. Because Catherine was not alone. Her name sits among dozens that did not travel as far: Grace Fryer, Katherine Schaub, Albina and Quinta Larice, Edna Hussman, Mollie Maggia. Teenagers and young women—sisters, daughters, nascent mothers—who in the 1910s and 20s painted radium-laced numbers onto watch dials so soldiers could read the time in the dark. For years their faces have returned to me—not as plaintiffs in casebooks but as girls laughing under factory lights, as sisters wiping luminous dust from each other’s collars, as daughters dropping coins into their mothers’ palms on payday. I want to tell you about them now not as an antiquarian item, but as a reminder of what it costs to be believed. Imagine 1917 in Orange, New Jersey. The streets carry the last habitual glow of gaslight, a softness nostalgic even then; the playground near the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation glows the brightest. The girls leave the playground by twos and threes, hairpins glinting, cuffs dusted, and drift under the trees with the giddiness of the well-paid. Their dresses show a ghost of green; their hair flashes as though threaded with slender stars. Neighbors call them the shining girls. Children point and giggle. The girls pretend not to notice, and notice everything. Most are not far from school—sixteen, seventeen, twenty on the outside. Some come from immigrant families; some are daughters of machinists or tailors; a few are recent arrivals themselves. Dial painting feels like a stroke of fortune.  Inside the studio, there is the intimacy of many hands doing the same small thing. The tables are set up along long windows; the brushes, finicky instruments prone to feathering, must be taught to keep their shape. Supervisors explain the method with the brisk efficiency of men who have never painted a thing. Lip, dip, paint. Point the brush with your lips; dip into the luminous mixture; paint the numbers, each no wider than a grain of rice. Repeat until the minute hand makes a circle.  And then the powder: a shimmer that settles the way flour settles in a warm bakery, a floating dust that gets into the whorls of your fingerprints and the crease at your throat, that makes its own Milky Way in the bar of sun near the window. At the end of a shift, it clings to everything—hair, lashes, cuffs. Supervisors brush it from the girls’ shoulders and save the sweepings for the next day’s batch. Still, the light follows. Dresses glimmer in bureau drawers. When they tip their heads toward the gas lamps at home, their teeth carry a private moonrise. At dances they become a spectacle. They glow under the chandeliers like friends of the band. Some dot their nails with the paint—bright-as-the-aisle fireflies for a Saturday night; others touch a speck to a tooth, a gleam to catch a boy’s laugh. The glow is not, at first, a burden. It is a novelty and a pleasure, an urban myth you get to live inside. Dentists are the first to understand what they are seeing because mouths tell the truth. They see a pattern: ulcers that refuse to close, gums that bleed at the suggestion of pressure, a metallic breath, and then—almost unbearably—the give of bone beneath a gloved finger. A molar will not heal; a second tooth comes out as if the jaw has decided to loosen its grip on its own architecture. A knob of necrotic bone peeks through a socket like a white matchhead, then fragments. The infection moves as if urged by some invisible current, and the jaw, that supposedly stubborn hinge of appetite and speech, becomes friable as chalk. The case of Mollie Maggia—twenty-four, pretty, not especially different from anyone else at her table—draws a circle around the horror. A toothache; an extraction; a wound that will not close. A second extraction; the wound widens, angry and bright. A dentist prods to locate the trouble, expecting an abscess or a tumor, and the bone itself, the unthinkable solidity of it, gives way beneath his finger.  In the months that follow, the jaw dissolves piece by terrible piece. The dentist, with a care that is no match for the pathology, removes what he can by hand. The mouth becomes a wound rather than an organ. An ulcer breaches the wall of a major vessel. Mollie dies hemorrhaging, a river let loose, at an age when most of her classmates are still trying out signatures for new names.  Someone—whether out of malice, ignorance, or a desire to appease a corporation—writes syphilis on her death certificate. This lie, like all cheap lies, does not merely misname the dead; it instructs the living to doubt them. Radium has an affinity for bone—the mineral lattice that gives us posture and poise reads the element as kin and tucks it away. Silently enclosed, it honeycombs the bone. The alpha particles—patient, particulate insults—whittle away from within. Marrow withers; blood falters; bones thin and then splinter. In some unlucky bodies, proliferations of malignant bone—sarcomas—rise up like alien fruit. The tumors can be grotesque in a way that begs for analogy and resists it. One woman’s pelvis blossoms into a mass “larger than two footballs,” a sentence that asks you to imagine the shorelines of her pain, and then know you cannot. Grace Fryer, one of the first to push the matter into court, does something very American and very brave: she looks for a lawyer. By then her spine is collapsing on itself, a folding chair where a column should be. She wears a steel brace that is meant to do for her what the bone can no longer manage. She is not alone. Katherine Schaub, Albina and Quinta Larice, and Edna Hussman join her. The newspapers call them the  Five Women Doomed to Die . Accurate, and a headline writer’s sin. The women walk or are carried into court on crutches and in wheelchairs, with bandages that cannot possibly do all the work demanded of them. Their testimony is a living exhibit. Every step is a deposition. The corporation does what corporations often do when cornered by the logic of the body: it delays. Hearings are rescheduled, motions multiplied, disclosures withheld, all the small paperwork bets that time will do for you what science cannot. Each delay suggests a strategy that can scarcely be said aloud: if the plaintiffs die, the case might die too. The women sit through testimony from doctors who swear by radium’s safety and from executives whose calm is a kind of weather. They answer questions about whether they kept their brushes clean, whether they licked more than they were told to, whether they were tidy. The questions are nominally about procedure, but actually about blame. In 1928—after public pressure and the accumulation of bodily evidence—a settlement arrives. Each woman will receive $10,000, a further $600 per year for the rest of her life, and medical treatment. To families whose budgets have been explained by subtraction for years, the sums look princely. To women dying fast, they are abstract. Some of the money pays for funerals. The company admits no liability. The law, in its careful language, grants compensation without confession. As if money could be placed in the space where an apology would go, and do enough. The fight, like radium’s own slow light, travels west to Illinois, to Ottawa, where the Radium Dial Company has trained a new cohort of shining girls. The illnesses repeat themselves with the eerie insistence of a chorus.  Among these women is Catherine Donohue. Her body fails with unnerving symmetry to the bodies that failed before, and yet she is singular. The grapefruit-sized tumor at her hip; the teeth gone; the jaw disintegrating into constant tenderness and pus; the gauze pressed almost permanently to her face.  By 1938 she is too ill to make the trip to the hearing, so the hearing comes to her. A commissioner sits in a chair that creaks when he shifts. Her husband, Thomas, not a man given to performance, folds his hands and keeps them folded. Catherine swears to tell the truth, and then does, beautifully and without ornament: It is too late for me, but not for you. The sentence is a curse and a benediction. Catherine dies before the last papers are signed, the machinery of appeal still grinding somewhere far from the little house where she made her testimony. We can say, accurately, that the lawsuits reshaped the landscape. They helped establish workers’ compensation for diseases contracted on the job; they spurred regulations and put an ethical fence around certain industrial practices. They seeded a discipline whose practitioners now measure particulates and solvent vapors, and try to imagine every way a routine can harm you. We can point to the thresholds and exposure limits and the way factories have been built since to move air and light through rooms. We can admire the scaffold of rules and precautions that grew from a single simple lie: that the powder was harmless. But to read only the legal outcomes is to miss the cost. The Radium Girls had to be spectacularly damaged in order to be believed. Their bodies had to make the case that argument alone could not. Doctors misdiagnosed them, sometimes with brutality masquerading as prudence. Employers dismissed them as careless. Engineers waved away their complaints as anecdote. Neighbors whispered that something else, something shameful, must be at the root of so much decay.  Only when jaws fell silent and hips shattered and the women bled out in their twenties did the world agree to look at the paint rather than the women. It is not a coincidence that belief arrived with the stench of rot. The lesson seems to recur: when harms are invisible, the harmed must become conspicuous. What lingers for me—years after first reading the cases, and longer still after seeing the photograph—are the ordinary details that stubbornly refuse to become myth. Grace’s steel corset, heavy and practical; Katherine’s scrapbook of clippings, the way teenagers catalog their lives with paste and scissors, the way grief drafts us into keeping a kind of ledger; Albina’s small, deft hands; Quinta following her sister not only into a factory but into a lawsuit that she knows she will not outlive; Edna, who surfaces in fewer stories, as if to prove that even among the famous dead there are shadows. And Catherine, regal from her bed. I try to imagine the factories as they would have felt from the inside, without borrowing too much from hindsight. The radios humming tinny marches; the chatter about shoes and landlords and brothers in uniform; the small rivalry over whose numbers are neatest; the smell of paint and pencil shavings and metal.  I try to imagine the moment the first tooth does not heal. I try to imagine the first night a girl wakes to blood on the pillow where saliva should be. I try to understand the spiritual fatigue of being told again and again that your pain is unremarkable, that if something were truly wrong it would reveal itself in some other, more palatable way. The horror here is not only medical but narrative. To be believed, the women had to perform their injuries—had to bring their bandages into court, had to sit on chairs that pinched their hip tumors, had to hitch their sentences around the gaps where teeth used to be. They had to hold very still while men took notes. They had to answer questions in voices made thin by anemia. They had to bless the room with the authority of deterioration. And then, when belief finally arrived, it did what belief always does: it asked them to keep proving it. It is tempting to insist that we would never, now, make such a mistake. We have agencies and acronyms; we have decades of epidemiology; we have monitors and meters; we can count particles per million and per billion; we can model exposures and assign responsibility and document the whole chain in a spreadsheet that can be subpoenaed.  And yet. I think about the slowness that still dogs environmental and occupational illness; about dairy-farm workers who swallow dust as spray drifts over their lunch breaks, because masking or shutting down would cut into productivity; about heavy-vehicle mechanics breathing diesel exhaust daily, long before the link to cancer is publicly conceded; about primary school teachers who stock their classrooms with paint, glue, and cleaning supplies—only later realising why their heads throb; about vineyard or orchard workers whose skin burns when sprays are applied, and whose lungs tighten in the summer months when the fruit is sweetest. The machinery of disbelief, once built, is very durable. It is greased by profit and protected by politeness. It can survive even inside institutions that mean well. It has learned to speak in human-resources language. The moral clarity of the Radium Girls’ case is a gift and a trap. It lets us say, with a clean conscience, that they were wronged, and it tempts us to imagine that harm must always look like that—dramatic, disfiguring, undeniable. But most harms are slower, are a little boring, are dark rather than luminous. They take years to gather force; they scatter symptoms across body systems; they let doubt thrive. The Radium Girls are not only martyrs of a bygone industrial era; they are a parable about the price of certainty and the ambition of denial. What, then, do we owe them beyond remembrance? Perhaps the most ordinary sort of vigilance. The willingness to believe someone before the x-rays become grotesque. The seriousness to take a complaint as data rather than as mood. The humility to accept that a process we have normalized may be quietly eating someone. The discipline to ask who is glowing for us—who carries home on their blouse the invisible residue of the conveniences we enjoy—and whether their paychecks include, in the small print, a bill for their bones. It is not fashionable to speak of heroism in this register. The word has been worn to threads by overuse and by the kind of advertising that calls everything heroic so that nothing is. But I can think of no better word for women who turned their bodies into arguments they never should have had to make. Heroism here is not a charge into cannon fire; it is staying alive as long as you can so you can sit up in your own living room and tell the truth into a stenographer’s notebook. It is answering questions whose premise you know to be obscene. It is saying your one sentence and trusting that the rest of us will carry it. There is an urge, in writing about suffering, to tidy it into catharsis: to end with a neat moral, or a reform that arrived just in time. I cannot offer that. The reforms mattered. The case law matters immensely. The rules built from their pain continue to save people whose names we do not know. But pain is not paid off by the rulebook. The ledger does not balance when you look up OSHA standards. The fact remains that the world learned to believe these women precisely because it could no longer look away from their bodies. That is not a debt the future can settle by conducting air-exchange calculations. It is a debt we honor by believing faster, and by designing work as if the invisible were not merely possible, but probable. It is also a debt of attention. There are other photographs that might have replaced the one that will not leave me: a studio with its long windows, a line of girls bent like prayer; a dentist with his mask slightly askew, eyes sharpened by what he’s just seen; Grace standing very straight inside a contraption of steel; a factory’s doorway from which every man once responsible for the safety of the women has already gone home. But I keep returning to Catherine’s living room because the law went there, for once, and because the camera did too.  The girls laughed under factory lights. They painted stars on their fingernails and a dot on a tooth. They joked about making themselves into lanterns. They walked home glowing. They brought home wages, and hope, and a dust you could not stop at the door. They walked into dentists’ offices and out of them different. They learned the names of bones by feel. They learned the stamina of pus. They learned that the body’s decay keeps time on its own dial. They learned the cruel curriculum by which a complaint becomes a theory, a theory becomes a case, and a case becomes a cautionary tale.  And so: enter the room. It is small, and the furniture is ordinary, and the air is full of the dignity of people doing something hard. The light is not kind but it is honest. The stenographer’s pencil scratches. A man clears his throat because he does not know what else to do. The woman in the bed, gaunt and unbowed, looks at you as if through you. She does not waste her breath on ornament. It is too late for me, but not for you.   We inherit the pronoun ‘you’ as if it were a courtroom exhibit, passed down a line of hands. It is our job to keep it in view.

Ali Cook, Phoebe Robertson CW: Sexual Violence, Secondary Trauma, Cops On Wednesday, October 1, 2025, Detective Scott Rankin called me into the Wellington Police station. I hadn’t heard a word from him since February, when Stuff  was told an extradition file was being prepared for the Vietnamese officials who sexually assaulted me. At 6:30 p.m., sitting in a bland police office under fluorescent lights, Rankin told me the file was being dropped. When I pressed him— why ?—he couldn’t give me an answer. He said his boss, Detective Inspector Nick Pritchard, had been told “last week” by Crown Law that extradition wasn’t going ahead. I asked him when exactly he was told. He refused to say. All he would repeat was that Crown Law had decided there would be no extradition. The last time he told me that extradition wouldn’t be a possibility, it was over the phone. I broke down sobbing. This time, I wasn’t crying. I was furious. Rankin seemed to think he was doing me a favour just by meeting me. He reminded me of it again and again—as if “fitting me in” was a great act of generosity. As if speaking to the victim of a crime was going “out of his way.” I’m sorry, but you don’t get credit for the bare minimum. Meeting with me is not kindness. It is your job. And then came the timing. I asked him why, after months of silence, I was suddenly summoned into the station. He admitted he knew Salient  had a new media request in, due at 9 a.m. Thursday morning. But no, he insisted, that had nothing  to do with me being called in at 6:30 p.m. the night before. What a coincidence. This struck me as strange because only five days earlier, on September 26, Salient  had asked the Police for an update. The official line came back: the investigation remains ongoing… Police, with the assistance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, continue to liaise with Vietnamese officials. Liaising with foreign law enforcement and officials is a complex process which can take some time… So which is it? On September 26, Detective Inspector John van den Heuvel tells the media the case is ongoing. By October 1, Detective Rankin tells me extradition is off the table, because Crown Law supposedly decided “last week.” Who’s lying? The Police Media team didn’t respond to Salient’s  request for clarity regarding this timeline.  The next day, Salient  received a statement from Wellington District Commander, Superintendent Corrie Parnell, confirming that “efforts to extradite two Vietnamese nationals have been unsuccessful.” He admitted the men had been wanted for interviews in relation to two complaints of sexual assault in Wellington in March 2024, and that while Police knew this would be “disappointing for the complainants,” extradition was simply “not possible.” Instead, Police said they were now “in discussions with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Crown Law to consider other steps,” and that travel alerts had been placed to flag the men should they re-enter New Zealand. The case file, they said, would remain technically open, but there were “no further lines of investigation.” That phrase—“the file on this case will remain open”—is perhaps the most convenient part. By keeping it open, Police buy themselves an indefinite excuse to dodge questions from both the media, and from me. They can stonewall the Official Information Act request Salient  lodged for the extradition documents, just as they’ve brushed off other media questions on the grounds that the matter was “ongoing.”  They can continue to refuse my repeated requests for my own case file. Yet, if extradition is impossible and there are no active lines of investigation, what exactly is “open” about it—besides the loophole that lets them avoid accountability? After hearing that, my disbelief settled in alongside my anger. For over a year, the Police have lurched back and forth, making and unmaking promises about extradition. Why should I believe them this time? Here is the record of their contradictions: March 2024 — Assault happened. April 2024 — Extradition “not possible,” but Vietnam would handle punishment. December 10, 2024 — MFAT: “Police have exhausted all possible avenues.” December 12, 2024 — My assault is made public in Stuff . December 13, 2024 — Police Commissioner says extradition still possible. January 23, 2025 — Extradition off the table; crime “not serious enough.” February 7, 2025 — An extradition file is being prepared. October 1, 2025 — Extradition “not possible.” No reason given. October 2, 2025 — Superintendent Parnell publicly confirms extradition has failed, with no new avenues. The reason? In my opinion: cowardice. We’ve seen what courage looks like. In 2014, a Malaysian diplomat accused of indecent assault (the same crime I have accused the officials of) was extradited to New Zealand—even though we had no treaty with Malaysia. Why? Because then–Prime Minister John Key raised it directly with his counterpart. An urgent debate was held in Parliament. Political leadership forced accountability. In my case? Silence. No urgent debates. No Prime Minister standing up in Parliament. Just a shrug and a line about it being “a police matter.” Meanwhile, New Zealand has been deepening ties with Vietnam. In March 2025, Police proudly extended their Memorandum of Agreement with the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security—the very ministry my alleged offenders worked for. The text itself admits that “cross-border criminal activities between New Zealand and Vietnam may pose a real danger.” Exactly. So why wasn’t extradition part of that agreement? I can connect the dots. Before the agreement was signed, extradition was on the table. After it was signed, it was “impossible.” And in February 2025, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon inked a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with Vietnam, touting “political trust” and “prestige.” Another handshake. Another photo-op. Another agreement that treats my assault as inconvenient background noise. This government loves to say it’s “tough on crime.” That toughness vanishes the moment a crime touches diplomacy. When it threatens trade. When it risks political discomfort. Then the line hardens: it’s an operational matter, not for us to comment. When Salient  asked the Prime Minister’s office about my case, his spokesperson said: “The Prime Minister’s thoughts are with the victims… It would not be appropriate to comment.” When pushed on whether John Key was “out of line” in 2014, when he personally intervened with Malaysia, the spokesperson replied: “We don’t have anything further to add.” No spine. No leadership. No justice. So when Detective Rankin asks me to accept that this is “final,” that there’s nothing more to be done, I can only ask: why should I believe you this time?

Ali Cook TW: SA, Violent Threats, Mental Illness, Disordered Eating, and Substance Abuse  Editor's note: the below personal essay contains detailed descriptions of sexual assault, mental illness, and the response by both the police and government. It is a heavy read, but it is an exceptionally important one. I personally have never read an essay like it, and working with Ali to put it together over the past month has been one of the biggest privileges of my life. But please, continue carefully and continue kindly.  On March 4, 2024, I was sexually assaulted by members of a visiting Vietnamese delegation. I was an international student from the U.S., far from home but trying to build a life in Aotearoa, a place I believed could be safe for me. The officials—members of Vietnam’s Public Security Ministry, a police agency in their country—were in New Zealand visiting the Royal New Zealand Police College.   That same year, in the same delegation, one of the men was later arrested for sexual assault in Chile.  This isn’t just about me. It’s about the legacy of the Ministry of Public Security, a system that shields abusers and leaves survivors to piece themselves back together in silence. In the months since, I have found myself on the news, my name attached to a case where the ability to even give a statement was constrained by diplomatic ties and political interests. Even the former editor of Salient  published a half-ass article about my case without ever consulting me—despite the fact that I am a student at Te Herenga Waka, and this is my life.  So why write this now? Why here? Because until now, I have only shared the full weight of this experience with my therapist. Because even though Stuff  reported on my case with care and integrity, mainstream outlets rarely give survivors the room to be vulnerable, to show the messy, painful reality of what comes after. Salient —with the support of its new  editor—has given me that platform. This is a wake-up call. The way sexual assault victims are treated is unacceptable. I write this not just to recount what happened, but to ask you—the reader—to listen differently, to sit with discomfort, to reconsider how you respond to sexual assault allegations in the future. What follows is not polished, not linear. It is my attempt to show you what this has done to me. It’s hard to describe what that time was like, so I’ll give it a shot. I knew I had to go to the police when the assault happened. For me, it wasn't a question—it was a promise. This wasn’t my first experience with sexual assault, and years earlier I had vowed to never let it happen without consequences again. Now, it was time to keep that promise.  But this case carried an extra layer of fury. The men who assaulted me were politicians, visiting on official business. Around the world, there’s a pattern: powerful men exploit women and walk away untouched. Too often, those accused—or even charged—remain in office, unscathed. Reporting the assault wasn't just an act of self-protection; it was a refusal to silently accept the status quo.   On March 6, I walked into the Wellington Central Police Station. I felt as though I were watching myself from a distance—dissociated, yet clinging to a fragile thread of hope. I carried a small paper bag of evidence: my clothes, and the neatly folded bills from the night of my assault. The bag weighed more than it should have, as if it held not just fabric and money but the unbearable weight of everything I could not set down—the shame, the fear, the terror.  The waiting room was empty, oppressively quiet—the kind of silence that presses into your ears until it becomes its own sound. I tried to fill it with small, meaningless jokes, forcing out laughter that sounded hollow even to me. Every attempt dissolved into the stillness, leaving only the hum of fluorescent lights and the relentless thud of my heart. I sank into the hard plastic chair as if I carried two bodies: one, the corpse of the girl I had been; the other, the bruised, breathing shell that remained. The weight was unbearable. An  ache no posture could relieve. On my lap, the paper bag lay like an accusation—silent, damning, proof that I could neither forget nor explain. I looped the night in my mind again and again, desperate to locate the single mistake, the invisible choice, that might have spared me. But the past wouldn’t budge. I stood under the shower until the tiles steamed and the water turned cold, scrubbing at my skin until it blistered in patches. I screamed into a towel, into the walls, into the drain—until my throat gave out and all that remained was a rasp. Still, the memory stayed lodged in my body, like a second skin.  Reporting felt like the only thing left tethering me to a sense of control—a final, trembling attempt to be heard. I clung to a fragile hope: that someone, anyone, might see me, clearly believe me fully, and act.  An officer led me to a small interview room. I sat across from him, fidgeting as he began to ask questions—each one a scalpel. The hours stretched endlessly. I drew diagrams. I recounted the assault again and again. I handed over every scrap of evidence I had. Each repetition felt like both survival and surrender. I needed to be believed. I needed to matter. But my memory was fractured. I tried to piece it together for the detective: a room thick with alcohol and sweat. Hands where they shouldn’t have been. My voice swallowed by noise. Time bent strangley—seconds folding into themselves, stretching into endless loops. My body froze, unresponsive, while my mind screamed. And then: blankness. A void so deep it felt like falling through air, endlessly, with nothing to grasp. When I left the station, I felt a fragile sense of relief. Maybe now something will happen. Maybe justice. Maybe I could reclaim a fragment of the life that had been taken from me.  A week later, the phone rang: The men who assaulted me had already left the country. I was told that action would be taken domestically, and that I can expect regular updates.  By November, nothing had changed. My case was dismissed.  I hadn’t heard from the police in weeks. No domestic punishments were being enforced. The silence was deafening—not just bureaucratic, but moral. I began to see my case not only as a personal struggle, but as part of a larger, systemic failure. Why do men —especially men with political power— get away so easily?  In New Zealand, the numbers are stacked against us. Between 2017 and 2023, just 42 percent of the 55,786 reported sexual violence cases progressed to court, and only 12 percent resulted in conviction. Meanwhile, 89.9 percent of sexual assaults went unreported. That means only 4.2 percent of victimisations led to charges, and just 1.2 percent ended in conviction. These figures didn’t just feel systemic—they felt personal. I refused to let my case become another statistic, another instance of a politician escaping accountability. I wanted to shift the narrative—to show that no one, not even a diplomat, is above justice. So, I reached out to Stuff. If nothing else, I could make my allegations public. I knew that publicity often sparks action, but more importantly, it offered exposure. Maybe prosecution wasn’t possible. But I could still make sure my story was heard.  I sat outside the Kelburn Library and typed an email,   the subject line stark and deliberate: “My Story of Diplomatic Misconduct in NZ.”  Not long after, I was connected with a journalist named Olivia.  Olivia and I planned to meet on November 5. The night before, I stayed up watching the U.S. presidential election unfold. I watched the votes being counted, state by state, and when the result was announced, I wept. A man found liable for sexual assault had been re-elected as president. Again, I was brought to the same question: Why do men get away so easily—especially men with political power?  The next morning, I woke with red, puffy eyes. My mind reeled, trying to make sense of how half a country—my country—could still support him. But I had no choice but to get ready. Olivia was on her way. The moment of sharing my story had finally come.  Olivia sat with me for a long time. She didn’t rush. She asked questions gently, listened carefully and made sure I felt safe. But inevitably the moment arrived. I told her what happened.  The next step was to secure my police file under the Privacy Act—to have documented evidence of the assault before the story went public. I submitted the request on November 8. Under protocol, the police had twenty working days to respond.  In the weeks that followed, I relocated to Auckland to begin my summer internship. The move also brought me into contact with Paula, another journalist at Stuff. We arranged a meeting. Like others before her, she asked about my story—but unlike most, she first made sure I felt safe. It was a small courtesy, but one I rarely received. I was grateful.  Paula explained the next steps: the story was moving forward, but we were still waiting on the police file.  By December 9, the statutory response period had lapsed. Still, I’d heard nothing. Frustrated, I rang 555 to follow up. To my disbelief, the dispatcher couldn't even locate my request—despite the confirmation I’d received weeks earlier.  The next day was Flatmas. After a Secret Santa exchange and a backyard sausage sizzle, my phone buzzed. It was Paula. She wanted to come over—with a camera. I knew instantly what that meant. I’d been bracing for this moment for weeks.  I tipped back the last of my prosecco and ran upstairs. My flatmate followed, helping me choose an outfit and checking every detail. Twenty minutes later, Paula was at the door—with a camera crew.   We turned the lounge into a makeshift studio. Lights of every shape and hue filled the room. A microphone was clipped to my collar, its cord snaking down my blouse; the prosecco wore off immediately.  It was time.  Paula began with questions about my assault. I recounted the story as best I could. Then, she told me something I hadn’t heard before. In a statement to Stuff, the Police said they had “no doubt” the crime occurred. They didn't question it. They believed me.  I froze.  This was the first I’d heard of it—news about my own case, shared with the public before it was shared with me. The police should have told me first. That kind of affirmation, that kind of belief, should have come directly.  When the interview wrapped, the photographer took portraits around the flat. I asked, half-joking, if I should smile.  “No,” came the immediate reply.  But smiling is my default—a reflex, a mask I wear without thinking. I paused, swallowed the instinct, and let the corners of my mouth fall flat. I could turn it off, at least for the camera.  Once the gear was packed and Paula had left, I tried to rejoin Flatmas. But something had shifted. I excused myself and went upstairs, spending the rest of the day alone, turning over the same thought: what will happen when this goes public?  Night gave way to December 11. Paula had told me the story would run the next day. I woke up with a single sentence in my head: Welcome to your last day of freedom . I knew the risk of coming forward. I knew how easily I could be torn apart.  All I wanted was to move through the world one last time, unremarkable and unseen. I wandered the mall, ate lunch alone, and sat for hours in a café. It felt like a farewell to being ordinary—a final day of existing without a headline attached to my name.  The next morning, December 12, my alarm buzzed at 5:30. My heart was already racing before I opened my eyes. I reached for my phone. The screen flared to life, flooded with messages—people recognising me from the article. The story had been live for just thirty minutes, and already, I was being seen.  Later that morning, Christopher Luxon was discussing my case in a press conference. Winston Peters dodged questions about me. The police had reopened the investigation. Police Commissioner Richard Chambers said that extradition was now being actively pursued.  Something was finally happening.  By December 13, under mounting pressure from the press, police located my privacy request—the very one they had previously claimed couldn’t be found. But none of my files were released. The investigation was now “open', and that meant access was denied.  The only option offered was to view the CCTV footage from the police station. Once again, I felt powerless. I couldn’t freely read my own statements, nor watch the footage of my own assault on my terms.  Not long after the story broke, I went to a flat party. A guy approached me—I didn't recognise him, though he insisted we’d met before. Within seconds, he was probing into my trauma, demanding details I had chosen not to share. I managed to slip away before he could push further.  Relief was short-lived. Soon after, an old friend cornered me, led me to a bathroom, and locked the door behind us. She, too, pressed for answers.  I left the party feeling deflated. Conversations that should have been light—our summers, new jobs, the small victories of life—never happened. Instead, people saw only my trauma, as if it had eclipsed every other part of me.  Journalists from all over the world began calling relentlessly. One night, around 1 a.m., I was on the couch, drunkenly devouring McDonald’s, when my phone rang. I glanced at the screen and thought: Really? Now? But I answered anyway. I felt like I had no choice. Giving a statement felt like the only way to reclaim a fraction of control over a story that was otherwise ruining my life. Slowly, my days were consumed by interviews and endless retellings—from journalists on the phone to strangers in the street. My trauma became inescapable. There was no refuge. I was a trauma-filled girl in the headlines, nothing else. Leaving the house became impossible. Glances from strangers no longer felt neutral—they felt like accusations. Everywhere I went, I sensed it: people weren't seeing me. They were seeing my trauma.  Eventually, I stopped going out. I developed agorophobia—an anxiety disorder marked by an intense fear of people and public spaces (or so my therapist told me). I ordered groceries to my door, worked from home, and lived off endless Uber Eats. I invented excuses to avoid socialising. Still, a part of me craved control.  So, reluctantly, I did what I’d promised myself I never would: I looked at what people were saying about me online.  I was alone in a Wellington hotel room the first time I checked. Perched at the edge of the bed—laptop on my lap, phone in hand, iPad beside me—it was a full-scale, multi-device operation. The MTV Music Video Channel played in the background, a surreal soundtrack to the moment. A bottle of red wine was on its way, a small comfort for what came next.  I opened my laptop and logged onto Twitter. Tweets about my story had appeared from all over the world. My hands shook so violently I could barely type. My heart pounded, every beat loud in my ears. I clicked open the comments, bracing myself—wishing I could look away, but unable to. The first comment hit like a fist: “Damn. I don’t get this chick who looks like she’s pushing 40, claiming to be a 19-year-old student, looking like she’s had four kids. Nobody is that desperate for someone like you.” My chest froze. My lungs wouldn’t expand. My fingers, hovering over the trackpad, trembled so violently I felt detached from my own body. My mind went blank, then flooded with nausea, panic and shame. A tear slipped down my face and burned; something in my stomach felt hollowed out, as if it had been ripped away.  I kept scrolling. I couldn’t stop. Each new message was a blade along the raw edges of myself: “Too ugly to have been assaulted.” “A pig.” “No one would ever want someone like you.” My body flinched with every word. There was doubt, and there were accusations that I was lying for attention or politics—but threaded through that chorus were the other, darker voices. A small number defended the men who had assaulted me; one comment that still sticks is, “It's what we do, rape someone without talent or virtue like you.” Others praised the supposed irresistibility of “curvy Western women,” saying they would have done the same. Those messages, many of them coming from accounts based in Vietnam, felt like a different kind of violence. And then a few people went further, fantasizing about capturing me into sex slavery, posting sick, detailed plans.  Then the terror escalated. I was cast as an evil American capitalist, a phantom blamed for wars I never fought and histories I had no part in. My body shrank; my breaths came in sharp, shallow bursts. I would dig my nails into my palms, desperate for something to hold onto.  It’s hard to describe what that time was like, so I’ll give it a shot with loose and fragmented moments:  In the months that followed, messages flooded my personal accounts—graphic, unrelenting, clawing at me. Every ping of my phone made me jump. Sweat pricked my scalp; my teeth clenched until my jaw ached. I pressed my forehead to the cold desk and rocked, trying to make sense, but sense had abandoned me. The world had become a predator: patient, cruel and endless.  The ACC process required a four-hour psychological evaluation—how fucking lame. But buried inside the clinical language was something unexpected: a record, a mirror: “Ali’s independence has been shattered,” it read, “by the sexual assault that occurred on the other side of the world in a place she was trying to make safe for herself.” Reading that, I saw myself. My thinking destabilized by any trigger, my mood sliding from sadness, to helplessness, to hopelessness. The report called it “depressive symptoms.” I called it trying to stay alive inside my skin. I closed my laptop and slid to the floor; the carpet was rough against my knees. The screen went dark, but the words burned behind my eyes. I grabbed the nearest bottle and drank until the walls swayed. I swallowed whatever pills I could find, chasing the fantasy that one might contain an answer, or a cure. I scoured the bottom of every glass and capsule for logic—anything that could explain how strangers could slice me open with a sentence and walk away unbothered. The more I reached, the emptier it became. Only the slow, relentless thrum of doubt remained. “Ali describes holding an enduring sense of ‘what’s the point in life’ since the recent assault,” the notes continued.  Maybe they were right. Maybe I was too ugly. I replayed the comments until they fused with my own thoughts and their contempt sounded like my reflection. The idea took root: if I could change my body, my face, my voice, my mind—maybe I could change their judgment. Maybe if I were different, the world would finally believe me. I stopped eating. Hunger hollowed me until even breathing scraped like sandpaper, but I welcomed the ache. I wanted a body beyond doubt—thin, beautiful enough to make the violence undeniable. I understood hunger might kill me. I didn’t mind. I only hoped my corpse would be perfect enough to be believed. “There has been little criminal outcome from either assault,” the report stated. I reread that line until the words blurred. No outcome. No justice. Just me—developing “features of traumatic anxiety.” Hypervigilant, the notes called it. Fearful of being harmed by anyone: the public, peers, even people I thought I should trust. The report noted that I had installed cameras in my flat, that I slept with the lights on. It was true. I lived in a permanent state of startle. I poured every ounce of attention into my appearance—tracing the shadows under my eyes, the tremor in my hands—sculpting myself into something the world might call worthy. I rehearsed answers in the dark, sharpening every sentence until it bled precision. If I spoke smarter, cleaner, without a stutter, maybe they would take me seriously. Months blurred into a ritual of self-erasure. I stood in front of the mirror until my legs shook, cataloguing flaws like evidence, peeling myself apart for a version of me that might be believed. Each time I stepped away, the verdict from the glass was the same: too ugly, too undeserving, too insignificant to matter. As Christmas approached, the media attention that had once forced movement began to fade. And so with it, so did any sense of progress.  On January 23, 2025, the detective on my case called with an update—the first I’d received directly, as promised. Extradition, once a possibility when my case was in the headlines, was no longer on the table. The reason: the crimes, he said, were “not serious enough.”  The words gutted me. How could something be dismissed as “not serious” when it had shattered my life entirely?  I broke down crying, right there on the phone. The detective sounded puzzled, almost uneasy. He offered no comfort—just flat finality that left me feeling completely powerless.  I hung up with the detective and texted Paula and Olivia immediately.  I was inconsolable.  On February 4, I was finally summoned to Auckland Central Police Station. The police had promised me back in mid-December that I would be allowed to view the CCTV footage of my assault, and now—nearly two months later—they were making good on that promise. It was the only access I was granted. My case file remained sealed. The investigation, they insisted, was still “open.” I was permitted to bring one support person. I chose Paula. And because I knew this was the only chance I had to prove to the world that my accusations were real, I agreed to let the viewing be filmed and eventually published. But the thought of actually watching what had been done to me filled me with dread. I knew exactly what I was about to see, and I knew the images would burn themselves into my memory forever. The detective who led us into the small viewing room explained that most of the clips we were about to watch had been taken on the night of the assault, but one had been recorded the following day. Then he looked at me and asked if I was ready. “Not really,” I said. “But I doubt I’ll ever be.” He pressed play. My memories of that night had always been patchy. Alcohol had been forced down my throat, and I’d become intoxicated frighteningly quickly. The hangover that followed was so brutal, so unlike anything I’d ever experienced, that I suspected my drink had been spiked. Still, fragments had stayed with me. I remembered my hair being pulled back as men poured whiskey into my mouth. I remembered an official shoving himself against me. I remembered, the next day, the confusion of discovering unexplained cuts on my nipples. “I have no idea what happened,” I’d told Stuff at the time. “I know something bad happened.” Now, here I was, being forced to watch it unfold. The police had obtained around two and a half hours of relevant footage—fifteen separate videos in total, some captured by CCTV cameras, others filmed on a mobile phone. Eight clips, about forty minutes altogether, directly concerned me. They weren’t time-stamped, so it was impossible to know exactly when in the evening each clip occurred. Still, it quickly became clear why police later said they had “no doubt” that I had been assaulted. I sat in silence, gripping the edge of my chair, hating that what I was seeing matched everything I had feared. Eventually, I asked the detective if I could take a break. When he left the room, I turned to Paula and whispered that I hated being right. The detective returned with water and tissues. He offered me a blanket, even a stress ball to squeeze. Small comforts against an unbearable truth. The final videos were taken on a mobile phone inside a karaoke room, away from the CCTV cameras. A man sang, badly, in Vietnamese. The bright lights, his oblivious performance, created a jarring backdrop for what was really happening in that room, most of it just out of sight. By the end of the footage, the evidence of repeated indecent assault was overwhelming.  I asked the detective if I could have another minute. My chest was heaving, my pulse hammering visibly through my blouse. My body remembered the trauma even more fiercely than my mind did. When it was finally over, Paula and I stepped outside into the heavy Auckland air. The cameras were waiting, just as I’d agreed, and this time I couldn’t hold it back. For the first time, I cried on camera.  I’d kept myself composed for months. Every interview, every public appearance, every statement—I had forced myself into a posture of strength, determined to look unbreakable. I thought that was what it meant to lead, to advocate, to fight. But as the sobs shook through me, I realised something else: strength isn’t the absence of tears. Crying doesn't make you weak. It makes you human. And in that moment, I felt painfully, undeniably human.  Through tears, I tried to explain what I had just seen. “It was like watching a horror movie,” I said. “In one sense, it’s almost affirming—I know now I was telling the truth, because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. But at the same time, it’s traumatising. It’s disgusting. I feel like every day I’m living in a mental prison. And they’ll never be in one.” What makes it even harder is that I don’t actually remember any of it. My mind locked the memories away, probably as a way to protect me, so the footage is the only version I’ll ever have. Watching it was disorienting—I could see myself, and yet it felt like looking at a stranger’s life. My body reacted instantly—heart pounding, hands shaking—even when my brain struggled to connect with what I was seeing. It’s a strange kind of betrayal, when your body remembers what your mind refuses to. That gap—between memory and evidence—has been one of the most difficult parts to live with. I have to carry the knowledge of what happened without the memories that would make it real in the usual way. Instead, I’m left with fragments: the weight in my chest, the panic that surfaces without warning, the girl in the video whose pain is frozen on screen. She is me, and she isn’t. Within a few days, the interview aired. For once, the reaction felt different. On Twitter, in messages, in conversations, people seemed to respond with genuine sympathy. Maybe it was the tears that did it. Maybe, for the first time, they saw me not as a symbol, not as a headline, not as a case file, but simply as a person.  Three days later, February 7, I was hungover and making slime with a friend when Paula called.  An extradition file was being prepared.  What the fuck?  The day passed with a blur of whiplash and cautious relief. Finally, my sacrifices were pushing something forward.  But the call hadn’t come from the police. They hadn't told me a thing.  In fact, I had to call my detective a week later to confirm that the extradition file was being prepared. He’d had a week to reach out. He never did.  It was a brutal reminder of their priorities. Information that shatters a victim goes straight to them, but when it benefits police optics, the press can have the story—just not the person at the center of it.  That was the last time I heard about extradition.  When Christopher Luxon broke his silence, it wasn’t to me. It was to the media. On February 27, speaking to media in Ho Chi Mihn City, and reported on by NZ Herald , he claimed he couldn’t “make public comments” for fear of prejudicing the investigation. He reassured the country he was “comfortable we have good levels of engagement between both systems,” that police “had some work to do” but were “actively meeting” in Vietnam. Comfort. Engagement. Work to do. Not justice. Not urgency. Not accountability. I read those words over and over, searching for any indication that my life—my safety—was the priority. But it wasn’t about me. It was about optics, about maintaining diplomatic smoothness, about keeping headlines quiet. He didn’t say he’d raised my case with Vietnam’s officials, despite traveling there multiple times. He didn’t say extradition was a priority. He didn’t say my life mattered enough to disturb the fragile politeness of international relations. Only weeks earlier, he had announced what he called a “major upgrade” to Aotearoa’s relationship with Vietnam—elevating ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and promising a “shared ambition to expand cooperation and to do more together across a wide range of priorities.” That public pledge of closer, higher-level cooperation makes the silence on extradition feel sharper: if this partnership truly includes deeper political and law-enforcement ties, where does pressing for the return of alleged offenders fit into those “priorities”? Is extradition of the officials in question one of these priorities? If not, how can this be reconciled with the Government’s repeated promise to be “tough on crime”? The contradiction is not abstract to me—it is the difference between being a constituency to be courted. and being a person whose safety requires urgent, uncompromised action. The government has a very large hand in extradition. And in my opinion, they’re doing a terrible job. My case crystallized what disenfranchisement means: not just silencing, but erasure. I was useful as a headline, a symbol, a line in a press release. But when real confrontation was required—when someone in power had to demand action—my existence became inconvenient. Disposable. And yet, I couldn’t speak out. I needed the government. Strategically, I couldn’t afford to be cynical about someone I was dependent on. It’s now September, and I have no idea what’s happening with my case.  I tried not to be political. But that became impossible. I am political—it’s who I am.  This is what disenfranchisement feels like—not just in the abstract, but in the daily, grounding reality of being silenced by systems that claim to protect you. I live here. I contribute here. I rebuilt my life here. But when it comes to decisions that shape my future, I am voiceless.  I came to Aotearoa to start over. I moved to Wellington at 17, it felt like a chance to reclaim my life after an earlier assault. And for a time, it worked. From April 2022 until March 2024, Wellington was a kind of utopia. I rebuilt myself here.  Then it happened again. And everything I’d worked so hard to restore was shattered.  But I never considered leaving. Not once.  Aotearoa is my home. I won’t let anyone take that away from me. I fought to be here. I stayed because I love living here.  And yet, the cruel unfairness of it all still twists inside me. While I’m left scraping for control—remaking myself in the faint hope that someone might believe me—the men who assaulted me have faced no punishment. None.  They continue to live normal lives. They go to work, maintain their high status, and navigate the world with ease. They have families—wives and children who love them, who trust them, and who see them as whole and good. They are able to build relationships, to be seen as human, and to exist without the weight of what they did pressing down on them. According to Radio Free Asia , even media coverage of my assault was blocked in Vietnam.  And me? I have lost my life entirely. My freedom, my trust, my sense of safety, and every feature of my identity—all stolen. I am left in the endless echo of what was taken from me and what could have been.   People love to warn that a false accusation of sexual assault can destroy a man’s life. The far uglier, far more frequent reality is this: when a victim reports a real assault, the world begins to dismantle their existence piece by piece. It wasn’t the assault that broke me the most—it was everything that came after, sanctioned and applauded by the very people who swore to protect me.  They call it justice; I call it a slow, public execution.  If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence, here’s some resources that you can go to:  Safe to Talk Kōrero mai, ka ora  National Sexual Harm Helpline 0800 044 334  Text: 4334 Mauri Ora—Student Health and Counselling For counselling and same-day student counselling   +64 4 463 5308 Wellington Rape Crisis  (04) 801 8973 support@wellingtonrapecrisis.org.nz Women’s Refuge  0800 733 843 info@refuge.org.nz   NZPC  04-382 8791  Level 4, 204 Willis St, Te Aro, Wellington 6011

Henry Broadbent (he/him) CW : Sexual Violence, Seconday Trauma, Cops In March 2024 Ali Cook, then 19, was sexually assaulted by overseas officials, members of a delegation representing a Vietnamese policing agency: the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security. By the time police in New Zealand had established their identities, the men had left the country. New Zealand and Vietnam do not have a bilateral extradition treaty. In the ~18 months since, Cook has chosen to go public with her experience, in an effort to obtain extradition, and justice. You can read her story, in her words, on page 18, under the title: Tough on Crime, Except When It's Me .  Much of the reporting on Cook’s story has focused on the question of obtaining justice in the absence of an extradition treaty. On October 2, Stuff  reported that the New Zealand Police would not pursue extradition, deeming it “impossible.”  This is despite precedent: the extradition of a Malaysian ex-diplomat in 2014 to face charges of indecent assault in New Zealand—the same charge the men in Cook’s case face. New Zealand and Malaysia also do not have an extradition treaty. In March 2025, the New Zealand Police and the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security signed an agreement to cooperate on “transnational crime”.  There is another, less headline-grabbing element of Cook’s experience that has led her to seek Parlimentary support: the absence of readily available, publicly funded, non means-tested legal advice for survivors of sexual assault. Sexual assault survivors in New Zealand have for years reported interactions with an opaque, procedurally complex, and frequently retraumatising justice system. 2021 saw the unanimous passage through Parliament of the Sexual Violence Legislation Act, a significant law reform that altered key elements of the court process identified as likely to retraumatise survivors.  Changes included: enshrining alternate methods of providing evidence; ensuring survivors previous sexual history with defendants is largely off-limits, and; establishing a requirement for judges to actively dispel myths and misconceptions surrounding sexual violence within the jury. Access to privacy, and protection from excessive cross-examination, are also included in the Bill. This legislation has broadly been seen as a significant improvement, but must be recognised as merely an initial step. Marama Davidson, in a 2021 press release for the Green Party, described the Bill as: “a bare minimum.”  In a New Zealand court setting, sexual assault survivors occupy the position of witness, and will be caled upon for evidence and an impact statement; prosecution itself is taken by the Crown. Alleged offenders—people accused of sexual violence—are defendants. This means that those accused of sexual offences in New Zealand will, in almost all cases, have access to legal aid and representation in court. Crown prosecutors have the resources of the state. A survivor, by contrast, must navigate the court system without advocacy, representing themselves—unless they can afford to pay for a private lawyer.  To Cook, this represents a glaring omission in our court process for survivors, and a gap that must be closed. This has driven her to produce a policy brief, titled The Case for Independent Legal Advice (ILA) for all Survivors of Sexual Violence , in the hope that it can find a sponsor in Parliament and become a Members Bill, addressing what she sees as an urgently lacking element of our legislation.  The implementation of free, independent legal advice for survivors of sexual violence, Cook notes, has been successfully trialed and implemented in comparable jurisdictions. Programmes are already in place in parts of Australia, Scotland, England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Each of these states has the same common-law basis to their justice system; the successes of these programmes elsewhere makes the absence of any similar initiative in New Zealand particularly conspicuous. The need for such measures is undeniably acute; sexual violence rates in New Zealand are staggering. A study published in The Lancet in May compared rates of sexual violence in over 200 countries across the last thirty years. Though it holds a specific focus—sexual violence experienced when people are teenagers—the study found that, in New Zealand, ~30% of women and ~20% of men have experienced sexual violence. Globally, those figures are 18.9% and 14.8%, respectively.  Combine that data with what we know about the rate of attrition in sexual assault cases in New Zealand courts (by some estimates only 1% of cases reach conviction), the epidemic of underreporting, and vast existing legal barriers; a stark picture begins to emerge.  A June 2025 Report from the New Zealand Law Society identifies significant barriers to accessing justice in New Zealand, and a widespread perception that “in reality, not everyone is equal before the law because not everyone has equal access to the law.” A legal system is difficult to access and difficult to understand is one that is definitionally unequal. For Cook, addressing this problem seems easy, even obvious. To her, it is less a pioneering effort to make change than something long overdue.  “No survivor of sexual violence should be forced into exhausting self-advocacy just to be heard. Independent legal advice would have spared me that burden. Survivors deserve a system of redress that is simple, accessible, and fair—and it’s time to make that a reality.”

I adorn your face from multiple lifetimes.   Do you recognise me as yours?   My voice resembles yours in one sentence,   Did I sound familiar to you?   I walk along the beach,   Etching my footsteps into the sand,   Only for them to disappear as the tide comes in.   Were you ever at the place I was?   Feeling the waves soothe through your body Like a prying thought.   Asking you to simply follow, without the details. Into confusion, darkness and anger.   And eventually art.   Do you understand these things in the depths I see them?  I like to think you would,   Fully. Deeply. Spiritually.  Because after all,  I am part of your art collection too.   - Nā tō mokopuna