In a selection of anonymous quotes, a group of female parliamentarians from across the political spectrum give an insight into what they deal with.
A study published today has called for urgent action in response to harassment of female MPs in New Zealand. The researchers from the department of psychological medicine at the University of Otago, Wellington invited all female MPs serving in 2023 to participate, and 11 accepted. They ranged in age, ethnicity, party (two Green, five Labour, four National) and experience, with five having held party leadership positions. None of the 11 MPs are identified in the paper, which is published in Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, but all have been quoted extensively about their experiences with harassment and abuse.
On who they receive abuse from
“If you were going to say, who was I afraid of, actively afraid of, it would be white men over 55 … and young men in their late teens, early 20s.”
“The women tend to be more personal. They tend to be from my constituency, and they tend to be frequent fliers.”
On the types of harassment experienced
“I mean, [threats of] rape just gets thrown about all the time.”
‘Things have been, touching wood, things have been much, much better the last umm wee while but noticeably better since we stopped having a female prime minister.”
‘The minute the prime minister stepped down, there was a whole lowering of the temperature, vitriol and nastiness … feels like the heat’s being taken out of it a bit.”
“I’ve had groups of the community who have … confronted me outside of meetings … They turned up to where I was going, and it was broad daylight, and I said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m on my way to a funeral’. And they said ‘well, that won’t be the only one if you think you’re going to walk away from us’. And yeah, broad daylight, quite threatening and intimidating.”
“My window got defaced by one of them. And it was ‘kill, kill [my name], kill politicians’.”
“It was around about the parliamentary occupation time. And speaking of which, somebody threatened to kill me on my way home that first night.”
“I think about being in a lift with three male colleagues. And, you know, very inappropriate comments … very sexualised comments, and you kind of brush it off at the time, but you [later] realise that that’s actually not. Not OK.”
On regrets
“On the one hand, I want to see more brown women and young women in this space. And on the other hand, I’m like, stay away, stay away, don’t do it. It’s a real contradiction. Now, I don’t think I would have still chosen to do it.”
“Sometimes it makes me more determined. And other times I just think, man, what the hell? Just why on earth would I do this?”
On support, or lack thereof
“And to suddenly have like, misogyny and racism in NZ crystallised for you so personally, every second of the day, because it’s relentless – there’s not a break from it. There’s not a single post that I’ve [posted] that doesn’t have, like misogynistic comments or racist comments on it. … And then you add to it that like death threats and whatever, and no one, no one prepares you for that.”
“You create this conversation … [but] it’s really exhausting, I’m not the ‘race MP’. I’m not the ‘misogyny MP’ and I don’t want to keep having this conversation.”
“I am very careful when I go out at night. [I’ve] got lots of alarms … I used to walk at night from places, I don’t do that any more. Just because there is a threat. And that threat has intensified for me since Covid.”
“Until recently … we didn’t have a locked front door at the electorate office, for example … so it’s gone from you know, wanting to be really accessible and open and understanding what your role is as an MP to something [where] … I can’t fathom us even going back there, which is really sad.”
“The support I get from my party is … They think you ought to just toughen up and get on with it. And you know, I don’t actually bother asking [for help], frankly … And I’m very aware people deal with more than I do.”
“A lot of it is kind of post-traumatic … I know exactly what happened, I know exactly where I was, I know exactly what I was wearing. I can see the whole thing happening.”
“[The experiences of harassment impacted me] profoundly, you know, to the point of suicidal ideation.”
“I think NZ has become very disparate and very fractured. And there’s huge amounts of anxiety out there.”
“Now that is very different from, you know, five or six years ago, it’s just that high level of anxiety you encounter on a regular basis, people that are really kind of on edge, and you’d think it wouldn’t be much to tip them. And that’s where I sort of feel as if I’m on eggshells with them. Because I don’t want to be the one that then tips them.”
