Temporary funding saves sex-abuse helpline from axe

A helpline for sexual-abuse victims has been given a three-month lifeline while the Government decides on a long-term strategy on sexual violence.

Accident Compensation Corporation funding of $350,000 a year for the Auckland Sexual Abuse Help Foundation helpline was axed in May in a "line-by-line" spending review, with effect from the end of this month.

But Laurie Edwards of ACC said this week that the corporation had agreed to a three-month extension while a consultant reviews the service.

At the same time, an interdepartmental Taskforce for Action on Sexual Violence, led by Secretary for Justice Belinda Clark, will meet on Tuesday to consider a draft final report that is also due to be completed this month.

Rape Prevention Education director Dr Kim McGregor, one of four community representatives on the two-year-old taskforce, said it was ironic a key service was under threat again just as the taskforce process was coming to fruition.

"It's disappointing when the Government taskforce is working to solve three decades of underfunding," she said.

Help Foundation agency development manager Paulette Benton-Greig said she was also disappointed by a Government decision to close down the taskforce from the end of this month, as originally planned when it was set up in 2007, even though its work was not done.

"Many of the year-two programmes never got started at all. We really just started to lay the groundwork in terms of what the sector looked like," she said.

"What we don't have is plans for how we can change this, or any plans for implementation and monitoring."

The helpline got 8500 calls last year, even though it serves only the Auckland area and is not well advertised.

Surveys suggest it reaches only the tip of an iceberg of sexual abuse.

Just over 6 per cent of adults in a 2005 government survey said they had been victims of a sexual crime in that year, and Auckland University research in 2003 found that 23.5 per cent of Auckland women, and 28.2 per cent of North Waikato women, had suffered sexual abuse by the age of 15.

Ms Benton-Greig said helpline calls had been increasing by more than 10 per cent a year.

Mr Edwards said ACC started funding the helpline only because no one else would rescue it in a previous funding crisis in 2002. "It was only ever supposed to be temporary while they sorted out other funding."