Scoop has an Ethical Paywall
License needed for work use Register

Gordon Campbell | Parliament TV | Parliament Today | News Video | Crime | Employers | Housing | Immigration | Legal | Local Govt. | Maori | Welfare | Unions | Youth | Search

 

Male Criminals Belong In Men's Prison

“Wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, as well as charges of breach of a protection order, intentional damage, and resisting police”.

Matthew Richard Nelson was sentenced in Hamilton on Tuesday for stabbing three people in a frenzied attack. He is entitled to reside with women in a women’s prison, all because we have perverted the words inclusivity and tolerance. He will be a serious threat to the lives of women in prison.

The current Parliament unanimously passed new laws allowing any man who says he feels like a woman to change his birth certificate and be treated by law as a woman. But even without this law change, biological men who self-identify as women have been transferred to women’s prisons.

This situation is absurd. I could say I feel like a man, but as everyone knows, that simply does not make me a man – when will society wake up and stop indulging delusions? Whether a man puts on a dress and makeup or goes through a full surgical transition, his chromosomes do not change. A biological male should not be in a female prison or in any female private space. This is a rights issue where Nelson’s claimed right to identify as a woman threatens women's rights to be safe.

In this case, Nelson attacked two people in a restaurant kitchen - the female victim received a serious stab wound to her face and back which also punctured a lung, causing it to collapse and blood to flow into her chest cavity. The third victim was a customer who tried to intervene and lost a litre of blood after being stabbed in the abdomen.

Advertisement - scroll to continue reading

Are you getting our free newsletter?

Subscribe to Scoop’s 'The Catch Up' our free weekly newsletter sent to your inbox every Monday with stories from across our network.

Nelson, who called himself “Emma”, and now “Pandora Electra” is currently in Auckland’s women's prison, where he “feels safer”. This is the new NZ, where men who are violent criminals can claim to be women and end up in a women’s prison. How will the government ensure they do not go on to attack and rape women while in prison, as is becoming common in other countries that have gone down this path?

We should ask the women who share prison space with Nelson whether they feel safe. How safe do his victims feel now, and how safe will the community feel when Nelson is released? The judge reduced Nelson’s sentence by 30% in recognition of his guilty pleas and aspirations to rehabilitate himself. Yet a pre-sentence report said Nelson is at ‘high’ risk of further violent harm to others.

NZ has an appalling rate of offending that needs to be addressed, but the current Government is focused on emptying prisons, making the problem worse. Too often vicious intentional attacks are met with minimal sentences. The government’s primary job is to keep people safe, and prison is a part of this. We must have stronger sentences for violent attacks, and we must keep male criminals out of women’s prisons.

© Scoop Media

Advertisement - scroll to continue reading
 
 
 
Parliament Headlines | Politics Headlines | Regional Headlines

Gordon Campbell: On The Government's Assault On Maori

This isn’t news, but the National-led coalition is mounting a sustained assault on Treaty rights and obligations. Audrey Young in the NZ Herald has compiled a useful list of the many ways Christopher Luxon plans to roll back the progress made in race relations over the past forty years. He has described yesterday’s nationwide protests by Maori as “pretty unfair.” Poor thing. More


 
 


ACT: Renews Call To Abolish Human Rights Commission

“The Human Rights Commission’s appointment of a second Chief Executive is just the latest example of a taxpayer-funded bureaucracy serving itself at the expense of delivery for New Zealanders,” says ACT MP Todd Stephenson... More

Public Housing Futures: Christmas Comes Early For Landlords

New CTU analysis of the National & ACT coalition agreement has shown the cost of returning interest deductibility to landlords is an extra $900M on top of National’s original proposal. This is because it is going to be implemented earlier and faster, including retrospective rebates from April 2023. More

PSA: MFAT Must Reverse Decision To Remove Te Reo

MFAT's decision to remove te reo from correspondence before new Ministers are sworn in risks undermining the important progress the public sector has made in honouring te Tiriti. "We are very disappointed in what is a backward decision - it simply seems to be a Ministry bowing to the racist rhetoric we heard on the election campaign trail," says Marcia Puru. More

 
 
 
 
 
 

LATEST HEADLINES

  • PARLIAMENT
  • POLITICS
  • REGIONAL
 
 

InfoPages News Channels


 
 
 
 

Join Our Free Newsletter

Subscribe to Scoop’s 'The Catch Up' our free weekly newsletter sent to your inbox every Monday with stories from across our network.