Alison Mau spent forty years as one of New Zealand’s most recognised journalists. Then she walked away to build the thing the justice system never could.
By Hear Her Stories and Journalists and Writers Foundation ·
Alison Mau has been made redundant five times in forty years of journalism. She says it with a quiet frankness that tells you everything — this is a woman who has seen the industry clearly, without illusion, and decided that what she could build outside it mattered more than what she could protect inside it.
For five years, she ran New Zealand’s most significant MeToo investigation. She published dozens of major exposés. She spoke to hundreds of survivors. She watched the national conversation shift — slowly, meaningfully — as journalists learned to do better and survivors began to be treated with more care.
And then she looked at the one number that hadn’t moved.
Around 90% of survivors of sexual harm never report to police or any formal body. In New Zealand, that figure had sat unchanged for a decade. All the awareness. All the front pages. All the investigations. And still — almost nothing.
“That was the real niggle for me,” she says. “The problem that remained unsolved.”
So she stopped reporting and started building.
The platform she and her co-founder, barrister Zoe Lawton, created is called Tika — a word that in te reo Māori means justice, and right, and correct all at once. It is New Zealand’s first fully independent online reporting platform for sexual harm, and it is built on a single principle the existing justice system has never quite managed to honour: that survivors deserve to stay in control of what happens next.
When you report to Tika, you are immediately granted lawyer-client privilege. Everything you share is legally protected. A language model — not generative AI, but a pattern-finding system — looks quietly for connections between your report and others. If three or more survivors reporting the same person are identified, Tika’s lawyers make contact and offer free legal advice. No pressure. No predetermined outcome. Just options.
“Generally, at the moment, if you report to the existing justice system, your agency is immediately taken away,” Mau says. “You don’t have much choice in what happens from that moment onwards. When you report through Tika, you know that the lawyer is working for you.”
For communities who have every reason to distrust official systems — Indigenous women, migrant communities, the LGBTQIA+ community, disabled people — that distinction is not a small thing. These are the communities who experience the highest rates of sexual harm and the lowest rates of reporting. They are not irrational for staying silent. The system has earned their silence.
Tika is trying to earn something different. Trust.
Mau is also honest about where the determination to keep going comes from. She is not interested in performing selflessness. “I want to get to the end of my life,” she says simply, “and know that I’ve made a difference in the space I’m best equipped to make a difference in.”
For a woman who spent forty years amplifying other people’s stories, that is a quietly radical act — turning the lens inward, and deciding the most important story left to tell is the one about a system that has failed people for far too long.
Tika is launching soon. If you are a survivor — in New Zealand or anywhere in the world — you can learn more at tika.org.nz.
