The young couple, like so many others, met in a bar in the Octagon.
The woman agreed to go home with 26-year-old Michael John Danyon Fraser.
She agreed to have sex with him.
She did not agree to be slapped.
When the victim tried to leave, Fraser held his full body weight on top of her and was "tugging at her pants to prevent her getting dressed" as she repeatedly told him to stop, the Dunedin District Court heard at last week’s sentencing.
Much of the legal argument revolved around the issue of consent and whether Fraser had misread the situation, due to his diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
Ultimately, Judge Jim Large ruled there was no room for misinterpretation, hearing of the victim’s repeated attempts to flee and her clear verbal instructions to stop.
"No means no," the judge said.
Five years earlier, a Dunedin woman was out socialising with friends in similar circumstances when she bumped into a man she had met on dating app Tinder.
Fraser "seemed like a nice person", she told the jury at a 2020 trial, before they entered his bedroom.
Three women - two of whom he met on Tinder - gave strikingly similar descriptions of being choked, hit in the face and forced into demeaning sex acts.
But the jury was not convinced and Fraser was acquitted on all charges.
Last week, Fraser was jailed for two years three months after pleading guilty to assault, assault with intent to commit sexual violation and strangulation.
But it may not yet be over.
His counsel, John Munro, immediately indicated that an appeal would be lodged as he pursued a sentence of home detention for his client.
Fraser’s case is an exception.
In New Zealand, it is estimated only one in 10 victims report sexual violence to the police.
Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence Marama Davidson told the Otago Daily Times: "The majority of sexual violence, and especially online violence, is not reported, because of sadly obvious reasons ... people aren’t believed, people are retraumatised and people are made to feel guilty and victim-blamed."
The Ōtepoti Collective Against Sexual Abuse says the process of reporting sexual assault to police and seeing it through to trial needs to be more victim-centred.
"What is lacking is a survivor-focused court system; it is currently not very supportive of survivors. It is extremely traumatising. They end up being put on trial," support worker Katie Hendry said.
Dating apps could be used as a tool to enable further offending, she said.
"Tinder, particularly within the heteronormative audience, is being used to perpetuate the stock standard rape myth."
Through an academic lens, dating apps have given outdated ideologies and antisocial behaviours a platform.
"There are a whole lot of social norms that allow [perpetrators] to hide in plain sight; the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality or the ongoing, continuous misogyny and ideas around expectation - thinking that sex is something that should happen ... these things all work to support that rape culture", University of Otago Associate Professor of sociology Melanie Beres said.
A surge in social awareness around dating-app-related sexual violence has resulted in a push for action.
Australian Institute of Criminology’s Sarah Napier said it was time for dating apps to "step up" and prioritise the safety of their users.
The institute’s research puts the issue into perspective.
A study featuring nearly 10,000 participants found that almost three-quarters of dating app users had been subject to online sexual violence, two-thirds had been sexually harassed and more than a quarter had been subject to sexual coercion.
Half of those who experienced sexual violence said the perpetrator subsequently blocked, unmatched them or deleted their accounts.
For dating app users, covering your tracks can be as simple as the touch of a button.
Since it was launched in 2012, Tinder has been downloaded more than 100 million times around the world and in 2021, it held an estimated net worth of about $42 billion.
A spokesman told the ODT: "Safety is at the core of Tinder. The organisation performed a comprehensive review of sexual misconduct reporting, moderation and response across Match Group’s dating platforms. Tinder was the first brand to implement the recommendations that came as a result of this review in March 2022."
As a result of the review, Tinder modified their app to make reporting incidents of abuse easier and more transparent.
In Australia, the New South Wales government recently held a round table discussion with the chief executives of Bumble, Tinder and Grindr to examine dating app safety policies - heeding the call for reforms after a NSW man was charged with murdering a woman he met online in December last year.
As a result of the discussion, the NSW government will be trialling a new Right to Ask system, where people can check the criminal history of prospective dates - a move requiring NSW police, Tinder and advocacy groups to work together.
The app has also updated its reporting process, making it easier to identify hate speech, sexual exploitation and harassment.
"I think dating apps absolutely have to ensure that they are not complicit in allowing harm to happen. That’s the same with any industry or any organisation, they have to make sure their product isn’t causing harm or isn’t empowering harm," Mrs Davidson said.
While some believed dating apps had not done enough to keep users safe, Dr Beres said their proliferation had encouraged users to be more upfront about their boundaries when communicating online and in person.
"People are being able to have quite explicit conversations around the limits of what they want to do, but people, largely men, who are interested in coercion will basically do a ‘bait and switch’, so when they get somebody alone they switch gears and become coercive."
Victoria University criminology lecturer Dr Samantha Keene said the apps were not solely to blame for the actions of their users.
"[They] may facilitate access to a population, and indeed people who are going to be sexually abusive may exploit that for their own gain, but the person behind the offending is responsible for it, not the dating app."
Dr Beres believed a push for consent education was important but the stories of sexual assault spoke to a much wider, cultural problem.
"What we need is a far deeper social change," she said.
"We need to start shifting the idea of sex being a kind of transactional activity that works to get a little notch on your bedpost to something that is recognised as relational - whether that’s for a moment or a lifetime".
That viewpoint was echoed by Mrs Davidson, who hoped to address that through Te Aorerekura, the first intergenerational prevention of violence strategy which she launched at the end of 2021.
Te Aorerekura focused on activating the power of communities and working together to enable peer-to-peer education.
"When you have every different community leading their own work in this area, that is when we see the cultural change happen," she said.
- Next week, part 2: How police are addressing sexual violence, and the women who were not believed have their say
