Alison Mau
Co-Founder, Tika, Award-winning Journalist | NEW ZEALAND
Short Bio: Ms. Alison Mau is an award-winning journalist with more than thirty years in major television, radio, and print media roles. A long-time advocate for gender equity, in the wake of the global #Metoo movement, Ms. Mau created a groundbreaking investigative journalism project at NZ’s largest news platform in 2018. Over five years, the #MeTooNZ project published dozens of major investigations and supported hundreds of survivors to tell their stories, leading to widespread change in the way sexual harassment is reported by media. Her leadership of the project has been recognized in national and international awards. In 2023, Alison Mau Co-Founded Tika, a tech-first access to justice charity designed to remove the barriers survivors experience when seeking justice and accountability. Her bestselling memoir, No Words For This, was released in April 2025.
Event: SDGs Conference 2025
Date: September 24, 2025
SPEECH: Kia ora koutou katoa. Ko Alison Mau toko ingoa. In the Māori language of Aotearoa, this means hello, my name is Alison Mau. I’m from Aoteraoa New Zealand, a beautiful country at the bottom of the South Pacific – a country with a stellar reputation for peace, a stable democracy, and, in particular, for its global leadership in the gender equity space. We were the first independently governed country in the world to grant women the vote. We were among the first nations in the world to achieve majority female representation in parliament. When I Googled that to check the exact details, the AI overview told me that milestone was built on “a long history of women’s political empowerment” in our country. But ours is also a country that bears a shadow not many in the wider world know about. We have appalling levels of domestic and sexual violence that belie that stellar reputation, much worse than our closest neighbor, Australia, which last year declared violence against women a national crisis.
In fact, in New Zealand, we have the worst rates of domestic and sexual violence in the OECD. Although it is not framed that way in public discourse, the truth is we are facing a national crisis of gendered violence in our small, idyllic country, and increasingly much of that is taking place online, or with the use of technology to coerce, control, and terrorize.
Zooming out for a moment. Internationally, the rise of online and technology-facilitated violence against women has become one of the most pressing human rights challenges of our time. It is ubiquitous and creates real-world harms, both psychological and physical. The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women has defined this abuse as “Any act of gendered violence against women that is committed, assisted or aggravated by the use of ICT such as mobile phones, the internet, social media or email against a woman because she is a woman, or that affects women disproportionally.”
This might look like a partner controlling a woman using spyware, tracking software, or the health apps on her phone or smart watch; the online environment is being used to spread misogyny or attack public figures to silence them; new technologies leading to new forms of abuse, such as the spreading of deepfake images; or the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. In my years as an investigative journalist writing almost exclusively on gendered violence, I have seen many cases of all of those categories, and even personally experienced one of them. But it is a case that falls into that last category, that really sticks in my mind.
Samarah, that’s not her real name, is a New Zealand woman who came to me in desperation after years of trying, on her own, to track down and stop the man who was posting sexual videos of her without her consent – all over the internet. Or at least that is what it genuinely felt like to her. She had done what society considers “the right thing to do”. She had gone to the police. They had taken a case forward.
She had undergone intense and victim-blaming cross-examination by this man’s defense counsel. And despite the fact that she could prove that he had uploaded the video to dozens, maybe hundreds, of pornography websites, her perpetrator was acquitted and set free. How could this happen? Well, at the time of her trial, under the New Zealand legislation called the Harmful Digital Communications Act, prosecutors had to prove that the offender intended to cause harm. A high legal threshold that made convictions almost impossible. That loophole was closed in 2020, but too late for Samarah.
Even after leaving journalism, I have kept in touch with Samarah, and I know she has spent most of the past decade chasing around the world wide web, filing take-down notice after take-down notice to porn websites, only to find the footage pop up somewhere else. Samarah is now part of a massive class action made up of women all over the world, which is suing Pornhub for allowing non-consensual videos like hers to remain online. This might sound like an outlier, something so horrible that it can only, surely, be happening in isolation. I am very sorry to say that when it comes to gendered violence online, it is everywhere you look and growing at an alarming rate.
A 2015 study by the United Nations Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development showed that almost 75% of women surveyed have experienced some form of gender-based violence online. A 2020 study covering 45 countries and conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit reported that 85% women have experienced or witnessed online and technology-facilitated violence. In my own country in 2017, Amnesty International released results of a study across Europe, the US, and New Zealand, which showed that a quarter of all women had personally experienced online abuse and harassment motivated by gender at least once in their lives. In 2021, UN Women reported that 60% of women in the Middle East had suffered from online and technology-facilitated violence and had reported it in the past year.
The intersectionality of victim-survivors must be acknowledged, too. There are much higher rates of abuse and harm in the LGBTQI+ community, and Black women also experience higher levels of abuse online. Sometimes it is your profession that will put the target on your back. I know from personal experience that women journalists are targeted disproportionately, and so are women in politics. In New Zealand, we are holding local government elections next month, an event that comes around every three years. The surge in racist, sexist, and sexualized abuse against women who are putting themselves up for those local council seats has made national news headlines for months already.
In 2020, at New Zealand’s general election, there were 263 women candidates standing for election to our national Parliament. In the lead-up to the election, those women were sent 200,000 toxic messages on Twitter (now called X) – most of them directed at Jacinda Ardern, and other women politicians like Chlöe Swarbrick from the Green Party and Judith Collins, of the National Party – so this was a misogyny issue, not a political one. How do I know about those 200,000 tweets? Those 200,000 abusive messages sent to women political candidates back in 2020 were detected by a custom-made Twitter Bot created by a women-led tech company called Areto Labs, a pioneering AI-driven content moderation company tackling digital harm.
When a tweet to a woman politician reached a threshold of awfulness, the bot would immediately tweet something positive and affirming back to the candidate. There is legislation in the wings that could help, and I would say not before time, because while technology-facilitated harm races forward, legislation to combat it tends to plod along in the distance, and it seems, is given few opportunities to catch up. A new bill called the Online Safety Duties for Platforms Bill has been mooted by New Zealand’s main opposition party, and if passed, it would impose legally enforceable duties on social media companies where there currently are none, protecting children, limiting harmful material, and taking down deepfakes. Unfortunately, it does not cover racist or misogynistic pile-ons as they would fall outside the Bill’s definition of harmful material. If the Bill makes it through, we will have to wait and see if it makes much of a difference. And finally, there is a light in the darkness for victim-survivors of sexual harm – whether it happens online, or IRL. And that is TIKA, the new NGO I have co-founded with the New Zealand barrister Zoe Lawton.
When I stepped away from journalism in 2023 after years of investigating sexual violence in the wake of the Global #MeToo movement, I was disappointed that all the awareness-raising and all the survivors’ voices we had platformed had not made a single dent in the truly terrible reporting rates, which had stayed stuck at 7 per cent for 10 years. That meant 93% of harm, including online sexual harm, was going completely unreported. We asked each other, my co-founder and I, what would budge those statistics. What could we build that would sweep away the barriers of shame and self-blame, aloneness and isolation, fear of not being believed or having their experiences minimized and allow people to confidently and privately make a report and take the steps towards accountability they craved.
We decided the answer lay in access to justice using two things: collective action, and technology. So, over the past 2 years, having raised more than $2 million in cash and in-kind support, we built a secure platform that uses algorithmic pattern matching to bring together groups of survivors of the same repeat perpetrator. We do it this way because we know that perpetrators rarely only harm one person, and there is better evidence, a better chance of an early guilty plea, a better chance of a conviction, and more support and comfort in numbers.
Once you register with TIKA, you have automatic lawyer-client privilege, a chance to find out whether your perpetrator has harmed anyone else, and a number of different pathways each group can choose for justice. Not everyone wants a criminal trial, so we offer restorative justice, a civil claim, or mediation, for example. The choice always remains in the survivors’ hands, and our lawyers advise and support the group for free because we are a registered charity to the conclusion of their chosen justice pathway.
TIKA is a very special word in te reo Māori. It means justice, or what is right, and we’re grateful to have had it gifted to us by tangata whenua, the people of the land. TIKA is a concept and a technology that has international appeal and a number of different use cases, and when we launch the TIKA platform next month, we expect to hear from thousands of New Zealanders who have experienced gendered harm online, whether it be harassment or online criminal acts under the HDCA and the Human Rights Act.
If I could finish by harking back to Samarah, the young woman whose life has been swallowed whole for ten years by the actions of that one man who posts her video online. I know one thing: I know that Samarah shares the same fervent wish that I have heard at least once from each and every one of the thousands of survivors I have spoken to. Samarah is desperate that no one else gets hurt. She wants her perpetrator stopped before he causes any further harm. And that’s where we come in.