Former Miss World New Zealand, Jessica Tyson is the founder of Brave, a charitable trust created in 2018 to help support survivors of sexual violence. Jessica also works full-time as a journalist at Māori Television and is passionate about te reo Māori. Jess can also be seen onscreen competing in Celebrity Treasure Island, with the new season premiering September 6 on TVNZ 2.
Mum was a competitive sportsperson and a triathlete and when she was pregnant with me, when I was in her puku, she was training all the time. Because she was swimming lots, until she was almost due, I was a bit of a water baby. When I was 4, I could swim the length of a swimming pool, and was swimming competitively from a young age. I also played basketball, volleyball and netball. I loved sports, but I was also a very quiet, quite introverted, child.
Mum and dad split up when I was baby and, although we saw dad heaps, we mostly lived with mum. Then when I was about 8, I was sexually abused. It took me a while to tell mum, but as soon as I did, she went straight to the police. The abuse happened over a few months, but because there was quite a gap between it happening and us going to court – about 18 months - when his lawyer was questioning me in the courtroom, I didn't know how to answer, so I just cried. The lawyer treated me like I was lying. It was horrible, because in these sorts of cases, it's really just one person's word against another. The man who abused me was also well known in our community, and lots of people wrote letters to say what a good person he was, what a good father, so it was stacked against me. Mum also suffered. People said she was doing it just to make people hate him. She'd be yelled at in the street, people saying she was a liar and asking why she would put her daughter through it. Mum put up with a lot.
It was really tough at the time, when he didn't get convicted, but I got a lot of counselling and a lot of support from my family so I was able to recover and move on. For a long time, I felt I'd dealt with it, that it'd been addressed by going through the court process, so I didn't talk about it much. Also, when I was younger, whenever I did try to bring it up, no one knew how to react. When I told my friends, they didn't know what to say, so for the next 15 years I bottled it up. It wasn't until 2016, when I entered Miss New Zealand for the first time, that it crept back into my thoughts. I was also studying journalism at university, and we covered the justice system, which made me think how wrong it was for people to get away with that sort of thing. Rape and sexual assault is so hard to prove, especially for past assaults, and that's a real problem.