Survivors’ trust in police has taken another blow. If it’s to be rebuilt, what happens next is crucial

The useful part

When failures keep emerging at the most senior levels of an organisation, the problem is not a few individuals. It is a culture in which the safety of institutions is still, too often, weighed above the safety of victims, write Sandra Fuller and Kyla Rayner of Wellington Rape Crisis. Every week, survivors of sexual violence sit in our rooms and weigh a decision that will shape the rest of their recovery: whether to report to police.

How it works

• Fifty-four cases – 40 involving child protection, 12 involving adult sexual assault – have had to be reopened after concerns about how they were handled under the oversight of a single senior officer.
• At the same time, the police commissioner himself is under investigation by the Independent Police Conduct Authority following compl...
• Our role is to support them with the information and space to make it on their own terms – never to steer them.
• Reporting means entrusting a system with the most painful truths of a person's life, and it is the system that asks that of them.
• Police cannot rule out that alleged offenders went on to harm others while those files sat closed.

What to take from it

Behind each of those 54 files is a person – many of them children – who did the hardest thing.

Details worth keeping

Nearly a thousand files were reviewed before those 54 were identified.