Raveen Saily was sentenced to nine years' and two months' imprisonment for the rape and sexual violation of a teen.
Warning: This story deals with details of sexual violence and may be distressing.
“I wished he had killed me, that would have been so much easier.”
The teen who was raped and violated by Raveen Saily in a Bay of Plenty community centre said the attack left her feeling “dirty and broken”.
She hadn’t wanted to deal with the “pain the rape had caused”.
“I lost all sense of identity. My hopes and dreams had disappeared. Why should I have to fix what you broke?” she told 23-year-old Saily in court.
The then-16-year-old hadn’t had previous sexual encounters and said she had wanted to wait until she was with someone she loved and cared about before being sexually intimate.
“I wanted to feel safe and special, and you took this from me,” she said.
“I experienced pain and fear. I was an object used for your pleasure.”
The forensic examination that followed the violation had been traumatic and painful, and made her feel like “an object, not a human”.
She said her “body remembers the trauma that [he] inflicted upon [her]”.
The girl now struggled to maintain employment, had severe mental health challenges, and needed ongoing counselling, therapy, and pelvic floor physiotherapy.
She struggled with attending school after the attack because of fatigue and anxiety.
Her mother also provided a victim impact statement, read by Crown prosecutor Hannah Speight, which said that like her daughter, she had also struggled to process her emotions.
She had also been surprised how long the justice process had taken.
“On TV the bad guys are caught, arrested and in orange overalls all in the first day, the next day they’re in court and it’s all over,” she said.
“It’s a huge distortion to what happens in real life. Just over three years it’s taken from start to end.”
The mother said her daughter had struggled to move on and deal with what had happened, and had a raft of ongoing mental health challenges.
It had impacted the relationship between the girl and her siblings, and her parents, but it had been because of them that the girl had reported it.
“Because what if it happened to her sisters, and every other woman out there, she was thinking about them too.”
Saily, who was 20 at the time of the offending, was found guilty by a jury on six charges related to the rape and sexual violation of the teen.
During the trial, the court heard Saily and the girl had been messaging over Snapchat before meeting up.
He had used the alias “John” and, during the trial, it was revealed he also had a number of different Snapchat accounts.
Prosecutor Sunny Teki-Clark said while Saily and the teen had been discussing sexual matters over social media, that hadn’t amounted to consent.
Saily accepted the sexual contact happened, but said the teen girl had said “yes” to each sexual act.
He said during his evidence at trial that he hadn’t used protection because his “pull-out game” was “good”, and said the teen had agreed to oral sex, “normal f***ing” and anal sex.
When the police officer asked him to clarify what he meant by “normal” he said, “just putting it in there pretty much”.
During his closing, Teki-Clark told the jury Saily had “frankly warped attitudes around sexual consent”.
On October 25, 2021, the girl caught the bus to Mount Maunganui’s Bayfair mall. The pair met and went inside before deciding to walk around the nearby Arataki Skatepark.
Saily had a flip knife with him which he threw at the ground intermittently as they walked.
When they reached the Arataki Community Centre changing room and toilet block, Saily forcefully grabbed the girl’s arm, pulled her toward the entrance of the changing rooms, and said, “Get inside, I’ve got a knife”.
Saily told the girl he would harm her if she didn’t do as she was told.
Fearful, the girl went inside where she was forced to perform oral sex on Saily before being raped and then sexually violated.
During his closing, Teki-Clark said the teen had never had sex before and all her sexual experience had been “second-hand from talking to friends”.
“It is utterly fanciful to think that she would, on the very first occasion that she’s met up with a boy alone, be willing to engage in this type of sexual behaviour,” he told the jury.
“That she would be willing to have a knife used on her, that she would be willing to be slapped about the face and buttocks, being degraded verbally, having her hair pulled, forced, gagging, vomiting, vaginal and anal sex in a public changing room without the use of protection, it just simply isn’t plausible.”
However, defence lawyer Bill Nabney said in his closing that the teen willingly entered into sexual contact and then almost immediately regretted it.
“And why wouldn’t she when you look at the circumstances and the place in which it occurred,” he said.
But this didn’t mean that, at the time, there hadn’t been consent.
Nabney said it was clear that immediately after Saily and the teen met they had begun to send sexual messages over Snapchat, she had sent intimate images and agreed to giving him a “blow job”.
He said the teen had good reasons to make up the allegations of rape – she was trying to cover her tracks to avoid getting in trouble with her strict parents.
Judge Bill Lawson said it was clear from the CCTV footage played at trial that the victim had been uncomfortable as Saily led her to the changing rooms, throwing a knife at the ground as they walked.
“You went inside [the Arataki changing rooms] and the CCTV footage again shows the complainant stood outside in what I would describe as a very hesitant way,” Judge Lawson said.
“The evidence given was that you demanded that she come inside, and she did so.”
The judge said Saily made threats to harm her if she didn’t go into the changing room and he persisted with the sexual acts despite her not wanting it to happen.
“Your response was, ‘You’ve got no decision in this',” the judge said.
A pre-sentence report said Saily maintained the whole event was “consensual”, and he was considered a medium risk of reoffending and a medium-high risk of harm to others.
Judge Lawson said during the trial, it was clear Saily had a “design approach” – using social media in circumstances where he had refused to disclose his true identity.
“That can only be for the reason that you were up to no good,” the judge said.
“Your offending was clearly premeditated ... in my view, it had an aspect of grooming ...”
The judge said Saily’s introduction of the knife had an overlay of “intimidation and threats of violence to achieve the ends that you wanted to reach”.
Judge Lawson adopted a starting point of 11 years' imprisonment, and applied a 15% discount for youth, and a two-month reduction for time spent on electronically monitored bail.
Saily was sentenced to nine years' and two months' imprisonment.
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.
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