Leading The way

Their paths may be different, but Louise Nicholas, Dame Jenny Shipley and Dame Margaret Sparrow share one thing: a determination to stand up and make a change. In an exclusive extract from a new book by Margie Thomson, we profile the three Kiwi women, whose influential work will have a long-lasting impact.

- Louise Nicholas

There’s a scene in the movie Consent: The Louise Nicholas Story that finally helped Louise fit one of the final jigsaw pieces into her understanding of what happened to her. When she first saw it, she burst into tears. “I realised. For the first time, I understood.”

It’s the scene that depicts when Louise, aged 19, was offered a car ride from a police officer she knew. He said he’d take her home, but instead he took her to a flat where three other police officers were waiting. She sees the men waiting. She realises what’s going to happen. “Get out of the car, Lou,” she’s told. She says she doesn’t want to. She’s even taken her shoes off so she can run. But she looks beaten.

The question she’s asked herself, and was asked, challengingly, by lawyers in court, is: “Why did you go into that flat if you knew what was going to happen?” The film-maker, Robert Sarkies, explains it, powerfully, visually: 19-year-old Louise is in the car, utterly diminished. And then, just for a minute, we see that it’s no longer the young woman there, but the 13-year-old girl Louise had been the first time she was raped, the first time a grown man ordered her to do what she was told, and out of fear she obeyed.

“It was little Louise sitting in that car,” Louise says today. “When I saw that, I knew this was the reason why. It wasn’t the 19-year-old following, it was that little girl again, doing what she was told. There were no words I could find to thank those people that made the movie because they had answered the question I could never answer, and so I still carried that blame. But I didn’t have to carry it any more.”