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(Open Letter to the Prime Minister)
Dear Jacinda Ardern,
I am aware, of course, that Parliament is sovereign in New Zealand.
However, as King
Canute is popularly believed to have found out, there are limits
even to sovereign power. One version of the King Canute story states
that he tried (and failed) to stop the tide coming in. It appears that
our Parliament is also trying to over-rule scientific fact by using
Feminist doctrine.
I am writing to request that you consult your Chief Science Adviser
with regard to whether it is appropriate -- or even sane -- for Parliament
and/or judges to lay down the law about natural phenomena.
In a letter dated 21 June 2021, the Ministry of Justice states that
clause 16 of the Sexual Violence Legislation Bill would insert a new
section 126A into the Evidence Act 2006, which would require the judge
to give the jury any direction the judge considers necessary or desirable
to address any misconception
relating to sexual violence that is relevant to the case. The Ministry
directs my attention to subsection (2), which includes a non-exhaustive
list of misconceptions that may (but will not necessarily) be relevant.
Whatever is listed in subsection (2) if/when the Bill becomes Law,
the problem is that there must be some authority which is deemed to
know the "truth" about the particular aspect of sexual violence
in question, so that the truth can be differentiated from misconceptions.
I would think that the relevant authority would be Science -- specifically,
Psychological Science. Judges are learned as regards the Law and Parliament
has a lot of practical knowledge about politics, but neither judges
nor Parliament are experts on sexual violence, as a naturally occurring
human phenomenon.
The part of subsection (2) which concerns me particularly is the mention
of the following type of "misconception":
(aa) about the prevalence or features of false complaints in
sexual cases.
There has been a lot of research on false complaints in sexual
cases. For example, Rumney ("False Allegations of Rape", Cambridge
Law Journal, 65(1), March 2006) presents a selection of findings on
the prevalence of false allegations, where the percentage of rape allegations
determined to be false ranges from a low of 1.5% to a high of 90% (see
my attachment, which is a cut-and-paste, because the table is split
between two pages).
This is a complicated area of research and it seems to me to me absolutely
obvious that neither Parliament nor any judge is competent to choose
one of these research results (or any other research results), determine
that it is the one true figure and decide that any other result constitutes
a "misconception."
However, it is important to know where your
Government stands on this King Canute-like issue. Under the Official
Information Act, could you please state what the "correct"
view of both the prevalence and the features of false complaints in
sexual cases is, such that any other view constitutes a "misconception."
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