‘Kick in the guts’: The human cost of reopening 54 child abuse and sexual assault investigations

Police files were supposed to pass through layers of checks and balances. Now 54 sexual assault and child abuse cases are being investigated again, leaving victims to trust the system a second time, while police face questions about why their checks failed. Paula Penfold reports.

Danni Nicholson was trying to take three days off work when Stuff broke the news last Tuesday that 54 adult sexual assault and child abuse cases were being reinvestigated by police.

Nicholson is the general manager of Whangārei Rape Crisis. Her organisation had not been briefed about the review, which mostly involves cases from Northland.

She “had a big read – it was concerning news, for sure” – and called her team together for a huddle.

They talked about what the news might mean for the survivors they were already supporting, for the people who might now contact the service, and whether they would have the capacity for what could be coming.

“You kind of have to brace yourself, because we just don’t know what is going to come out of it,” Nicholson said. “How big it’s going to be.”

Police have reviewed almost 1,000 adult sexual assault and child protection files that were managed by detective inspector Kevan Verry during a three-year period from May 2023.

The review began after concerns were raised about one file: a historical allegation of sexual abuse. The file had not been closed, but no investigations had been carried out for two years.

That index file led initially to 13 more cases being identified for re-investigation. Then a wider review found another 40. That meant, including the case that triggered the review, 54 investigations needed to be done again. Police have said most of the 54 relate to Verry’s time as a detective senior sergeant in the Northland police district, where he was adult sexual assault and child protection coordinator.

He is now subject to an employment investigation and is not currently working. No findings have been made against him, and Verry has declined to comment while the employment process is underway, other than to say detail in terms of the numbers of files reviewed and reopened was “news to me”.

For Nicholson, her first thought was not how it had happened, it was what it would mean for those whose cases are being reopened.

“It takes such an enormous amount of courage to come forward in the first place,” she said. “It’s incredibly hard for them to trust someone first with their story, and then to go forward and report their abuse, and then to engage with the justice system. Doing all that and not getting a result, and then now having to potentially face doing it again, hoping for a different outcome. That’s a little bit of a kick in the guts.”

Whangārei Rape Crisis is now trying to prepare itself for what might come next.

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