It's just not cricket

Three ways NZ bureaucrats and leaders are showing contempt for women

1. Cricket NZ: Playing cricket with the worst of women-haters

Women in Afghanistan can’t leave the house without male permission, can’t exercise, can’t look at men, can’t show any part of their face or body outside of the home, can’t run a business, and certainly can’t get an education. This year the ruling Taliban, the orchestrator of these violations, has doubled down: women must not speak or laugh if they can be heard outside the home, women are disappearing, women are being whipped and women are being stoned to death for alleged adultery. Australia repeatedly refuses to play Afghanistan in cricket because of the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls but Afghanistan’s good status among certain players remains. It’s still part of the International Cricket Council (ICC) despite ICC’s own rules that each member must support a national women’s cricket team (women haven’t been able to play sports in Afghanistan since September 2021). As for New Zealand, as I write the Black Caps are about to start playing a one-off Test against Afghanistan in India.

NZ Cricket has claimed that it’s better to play and advocate for Afghan women than boycott. This rings hollow. We don’t see any evidence that NZ Cricket is condemning the Taliban and its violence against women. In fact, in this weird video below, captains of the Afghan and New Zealand cricket teams jointly grin while removing a black veil from a trophy. It seems nothing short of gloating. It’s called an unveiling and anyone with an inkling of concern about what’s going on in Afghanistan would surely find this dark. We see a brotherhood and an inanimate trophy given the light of day denied to some 20 million human beings.

2. NZ Police: Deeming the decades-old symbol for women’s rights “hate speech”

In August the Free Speech Union reported what they had found in a NZ police document. It was a manual for compulsory training on hate speech. Hate speech, according to the police, is part of hate-motivated crime which is defined as “any offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated, wholly or in part, by a hostility or prejudice based on a person’s particular characteristic, such as race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or age”. Hate speech is entirely based on perception.

The manual instructs police to Recognise, record and respond to hate speech. There are pictures and everything showing examples of hate-y speech. What vile things does it show, you might ask. Well, it shows a handful of people holding placards. One placard says Free speech, one says There are only two genders (we’re worried about sex not gender, you doofuses) and, wait for it, one has a women’s liberation sign. New police recruits, and perhaps the police generally, are being taught that the fist in a venus sign, and presumably all it entails—you know women wanting freedom, equality, protection from violence and control over our bodies— is hate.

3. MoJ and others: De-sexing information about sexual violence perpetrators

Perhaps the most striking statistic about sexual violence in New Zealand is that 98% of all convicted sexual offenders are male. These numbers are recorded and published by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) but the figures are buried deep in the Ministry’s website. The Ministry’s sexual violence page—which provides a summary of the issues—does mention that females are significantly more likely to be victims of sexual abuse, but it makes no mention of the overwhelming difference in who is likely to be a perpetrator. That’s weird though familiar. Trying to de-sex the narrative of who commits sexual violence has been going on in various ways for years now. But this discrepancy between the sex of perpetrators is not some slight trend with large margins of error and multiple caveats. It’s almost as bimodal as you can get. The story could not be clearer. We know the one shared characteristic of those who commit sexual violence in Aotearoa and throughout the world. If we’re serious about meaningful solutions, if we’re serious about protecting girls and women from violence, we need to be clear-eyed, factual and upfront about what’s going on.

The fact that it is—with only a very few exceptions—males who sexually assault females is ignored by those who want to get rid of single-sex spaces. This group, largely motivated by a compassion for transgender people that sees them suppress compassion for females, would rather sidestep the facts of male violence. They’re in an enormous rush to make places where women and girls remove clothes (and thereby are more vulnerable to attack) gender-neutral. Males, responsible for 98% of sexual violence, welcomed into enclosed spaces with females? What could possibly go wrong?

The dismissal of women’s and girls’ safety, this intentional disregard for us, is largely non-partisan. Before the election, Chris Luxon (now PM) said there was no need for laws about who used which toilet and those wanting to discuss bathrooms were “on another planet”. Labour leader Chris Hipkins called a bill that did the decent thing of promoting unisex loos alongside male and female loos “absolutely ridiculous” and that “the country had bigger issues to worry about”. The Green Party similarly scoffed at the bill. Managing Director of the lobby group InsideOUT has also called single-sex bathrooms “ridiculous”. InsideOUT is paid generously by the government to teach school students (as well as employees and health professionals) that sex isn’t very important—only gender identity is. It seems, in all their efforts to promote inclusivity, InsideOUT has no interest in teaching young women that they count too.

InsideOUT’s and its friends are busy pursuing a dreamed-up-gender-fluid-inclusive-be-kind-trans-joy-utopia. The reality of this world, of male violence and the known strategies to keep girls and women safe and included, just don’t matter that much.

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