Kia ora Liz and the Ministerial Services Team

Thanks for getting back to us regarding our input to the National Strategy to Eliminate Family Violence and Sexual Violence project.

The key concept that our team has been working to promote for the past years is to protect our most vulnerable by creating an awareness of recording to make people responsible.

Every New Zealander is legally allowed to record their conversations and the interactions they have. Imagine if every perpetrator was aware that they may be being recorded. It is a little like a cardboard cutout policeman placed in malls or on the side of roads, which makes people aware of the potential negative consequences of their actions.

We believe this same psychology can be levered to help prevent abuse. There have been recent cases in the news where victims have been covertly recording their abusers and this has been used as damning evidence against them. This was useful AFTER the act, but imagine if the abuser knew it was being recorded or even if they knew it was common that people may record and so are unsure if their conduct may be recorded or not. This would be beneficial BEFORE and very likely prevent an attack and also ongoing negative behaviour.

There are pros and cons in this situation which, of course, we have considered but there are three key ways, we believe, this can be implemented.

  1. Most people, especially the young, have devices they carry - even the most basic smartphone is able to be made into a recording device. There are also other particular devices built especially for this purpose (such as 'dinky' USB digital recorders).
  2. We mainly propose an education campaign to raise awareness of this and to use a symbol (like the white ribbon or poppy or daffodil) to keep the idea in the forefront but also that individuals can display it to show that they are empowered with the knowledge to protect themselves. This symbol could also serve a wider purpose for all prevention solutions.
  3. It is possible cases will arise where awareness doesn't prevent abuse - devices can be forcefully removed from victims etc. The Typing Company Ltd has the nationwide distribution rights for software solutions that the New Zealand Court System used for many years to record and automatically transfer audio for remote transcription purposes. We would propose that for many businesses and vulnerable individuals (children/tamariki in high risk situations etc) this concept could be developed whereby recordings can be transmitted (perhaps every five minutes, as per the Courts, or every sixty seconds, or even continuously, in real time, if required) and securely stored out of reach of the perpetrator before they are able to disable it and the knowledge of this would also help prevent abuse of our most vulnerable.

We would love to assist in preventing abuse in New Zealand and will do what we can to assist your team with the resources we have. These three resources are a couple of links that help to demonstrate our ideas:

Kind regards

The Typing Company Ltd (TTCL) Team



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TTCL Team

Help fight Abuse, visit https://ttcl-team.cares.nz