Commonly asked pātai

Tika will offer a charitable legal service to support the victim-survivors of sexual harm in 2025. In particular, it will focus on serial perpetrators who have multiple victim-survivors, and supporting those people.

Reporting sexual harm can be a tough and lonely road, and victim-survivors often feel isolated and lack the support they need to access justice. These barriers mean only 7% of victim-survivors of sexual harm ever report it.

Tika will provide a safe, secure and private way for those people to seek accountability through collective action, along the legal pathway of their choice.

We’re building a unique new platform which uses machine learning to help find out whether your perpetrator has harmed others who have also registered with Tika. The safe and secure technology will use the information you provided in your registration form about the perpetrator to check whether others have entered the same information. This includes the perpetrator’s name, as well as unique identifiers such as their email address, phone number, social media handle, photo or other information about the perpetrator. That’s why it’s good to enter as much information as you can remember. If it finds a connection with another client, we’ll let you know.

Yes, we welcome people of all genders.

No, there’s no charge to join Tika as a client.

No, you can join if you have experienced assault, childhood sexual abuse, online harm, or sexual harassment. This may have happened at home, in your workplace, church, school or university, a sports or other kind of club, or in the community.

No, we need you to provide your name, contact details and identification like your drivers licence or passport. This is for your own safety and ensures that no one joins Tika with a fake identity to compromise the integrity of our service, such as a perpetrator.

Yes, there is no time limit. We welcome anyone who has experienced sexual harm as children, teenagers, or adults. The only requirement is that you are aged 16+ at the time you join Tika.

We have made our registration process as simple as possible, but there is some mandatory information we need from you. Your information will be stored securely.

No. Tika’s platform will be safe and secure and the details of your perpetrator will not be shared publicly. At the end of the legal process, a judge or disciplinary tribunal may decide to name the perpetrator or the perpetrator may get name suppression.

When you register with Tika you enter into a lawyer / client relationship with a Tika lawyer. This means that your information will not be shared with anyone unless you provide permission. Your information cannot be requested by anyone, including the perpetrator, under legislation like the Privacy Act.

You will not be forced to do anything you don’t feel comfortable with and can withdraw at any time.

That’s entirely your decision, and you can change your mind at any time.

False reporting has the potential to harm innocent individuals.  We acknowledge there will always be a very small minority of people who will try to engage in bad faith or with malicious intent, especially where a service is created to be accessible and sensitive to the experience of victim-survivors. Tika will always begin from a place of trust; however, making a false complaint is a serious contravention of our policies and in some cases, is illegal under the Crimes Act. Every ‘connection’ found by Tika’s platform will be manually reviewed by our legal team, to ensure false reports are flagged and excluded, and processes are being developed to address our response to such situations.

Where a group of clients choose to report to NZ Police, their file will be reviewed by NZ Police. NZ Police will then decide whether there is sufficient evidence under the NZ Police Prosecution Guidelines to prosecute the individual. The same applies to regulatory bodies such as the Medical Council and Teachers’ Council, which will determine whether to prosecute the individual. Where a group chooses to file a civil claim, the evidence will be reviewed by Tika’s legal team, which will determine whether to file a civil claim on the group’s behalf.

We have had the protection of victim-survivors' data as our number one priority since day one of Tika’s development - it’s right at the core of our service. We know we live in a time of increasingly common and sophisticated cyber security threats; our system will undergo stringent data-security testing at every stage. Testing will be carried out under a recognised ethical framework and will include those with lived experience of sexual harm; however, these individuals will not be asked to input their own personal data into Tika’s platform during the development process.

Tika’s technology includes a secure, trauma-informed reporting platform, and an insight tool which uses pattern recognition to search for matches in the information provided by our registered clients. It will not use publicly available generative AI (such as ChatGPT 4.0) or chatbots.

The large language model (LLM) component of Tika’s technology will not interact with victims in any way. It is purely a tool for our lawyers, to support the task of reviewing databases of complex and detailed information.

Our programme is built to stop repeat perpetrators from harming others. When you register with Tika, you will input information that may help find out whether your offender has also offended against others; as different Tika clients may input different information about the same perpetrator, the use of machine learning will be vital to scan the information and identify patterns.

Once a pattern is found and a group of one or more victim-survivors is identified, the information is flagged to a lawyer on Tika’s legal team. No clients who has submitted information will be contacted before the information has been verified by a lawyer.

This depends on whether other clients have identified the same perpetrator. It could be instantly, or it could take weeks, months or years. If you decide you don’t want to wait, you can report to NZ Police via Tika’s platform at any time.

Tika began five years ago with a simple question - how can we help remove the barriers victim-survivors of sexual harm face when they are deciding whether to report or not? We discovered that most people share the same concerns about reporting, including uncertainty about what happened, shame and self-blame, fear of not being believed, fear of retribution, and a reluctance to negotiate the legal system alone. Our tech platform  is designed to make reporting a less lonely process by making it safe, secure and anchored in a sense of community and shared experience.  We know there is strength in numbers, so our platform is built to help groups of victim-survivors seek justice and accountability together, along the pathway of their choosing.

We are in the later stages of our  platform development, and in the months before our launch we will be using ethical frameworks to test this by engaging with sector experts and people with lived experience, to ensure it is safe, robust and secure.

Above all, privacy for victim-survivors is at the core of our philosophy, and our platform will not be open to the public before this has been robustly tested and proven. Ultimately, Tika will operate like a law firm, and all technology we use is designed to help our legal team better serve our clients, and is subject to the same levels of privacy as any other law firm or legal representation.

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Once three clients connect, a group is formed. Any additional clients are added to the group when they join Tika.

Yes. Victim-survivors of sexual harm are at the heart of everything we do at Tika. We understand that everyone’s experience is different, and that you will come to our platform at your own unique moment - we want your experience to reflect that.  

Our processes, from start to finish, have been co-designed by people with lived experience of sexual harm and focus closely on their needs in a trauma-informed manner.

We are establishing a Lived Experience Advisory Board which will advise us on Tika's internal processes, and our programmes and messaging. And because Tika will operate like a law firm, it is bound by the same laws and regulations as law firms, including the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006 and the Conduct and Client Care Rules 2008. This puts our clients at the centre of our processes, and ensures they have full control over if, and how, their information is used. The decision to proceed through each stage of the service remains entirely in the client’s hands, and they can put their file on hold if they need time to reflect and decompress, or withdraw at any time, no questions asked.