05/09/2026
A teacher groomed and sexually abused a 15 year old girl at his school. He went to prison for it. Then he went online to boast about it.
And under the law where they both lived, she was the one who was not allowed to speak.
The girl was Grace Tame. She was in Year 10 at a Hobart school, underweight and seriously unwell with anorexia, when a teacher more than forty years older than her began abusing her. He was a respected figure at the school. That is how grooming works. It does not look like a stranger in a car. It looks like a trusted adult who has made himself indispensable.
She reported him in 2011. He pleaded guilty to maintaining a sexual relationship with a person under 17 and to possessing child exploitation material. He was sentenced to two years and ten months. He served about nineteen months.
In 2015 he was jailed again over social media posts, some of which boasted about the offending. In 2017 he sat for a sympathetic media interview. He talked about a schoolgirl's abuse in public, using his own name, more than once.
Grace Tame could not reply in hers.
Here is the law that made that true. Section 194K of the Tasmanian Evidence Act, in force since 2001, made it a criminal offence to publish anything identifying the victim of a sexual crime. That included the victim identifying herself. Tasmania and the Northern Territory were the only places in the country with a rule like it.
Read that again. A convicted pa******le could narrate his crimes to a journalist. His victim, now an adult who wanted to campaign on child protection under her own name, faced prosecution if she did.
In reporting she was a Jane Doe.
Think about what that silence does. It is not neutral. It protects the reputation of institutions. It isolates survivors from each other. It lets the person who did the harm control the story, because he is the only one in it who is allowed to talk.
In November 2018 the journalist and abuse survivor Nina Funnell, working with Tame, the pro bono firm Marque Lawyers and advocacy groups, launched a campaign called Let Her Speak. The aim was narrow. Change the gag laws so that survivors who want to be named can be.
For Tame there was no simple switch to flick. To be named she had to go to the Supreme Court of Tasmania and ask a judge for a personal exemption. The process took about two years and around ten thousand dollars in legal costs.
Consider that figure for a moment. Ten thousand dollars, and two years, for the right to say your own name. Most survivors have neither. That was the point of the campaign. What was possible for one person with a legal team should be automatic for everyone.
In August 2019 the court granted the order. Grace Tame became the first woman in Tasmania to win the legal right to speak publicly about her own sexual abuse under her own name.
Once she could speak, she did not stop.
In April 2020 Tasmania rewrote the gag law so that adult survivors can now self identify. In July 2020 the Northern Territory did the same. Similar restrictions in Victoria were wound back after a related campaign. Thousands of people who had been legally silenced could now describe what had happened to them, on the record, as themselves.
In January 2021 Grace Tame was named Australian of the Year. She was the first survivor of child sexual abuse to receive it. She used the year to force a national conversation about grooming, and about how the everyday language people use, the talk of affairs and relationships and older men getting lucky, quietly takes the adult's side.
Here is where it touches you. If you have ever watched a survivor on the news speak under their own name and photograph, and thought nothing of it, that was a criminal act in two parts of this country until very recently, and a young woman had to spend two years in court to begin changing it.
The man who abused her spent years taunting survivors online. In 2026 he was found unfit to stand trial over further alleged menacing posts.
Grace Tame no longer needs a court's permission to answer him. Or anyone's.
