Say no to Mike Tyson

Shine and many other organisations and individuals who work to achieve safety and equality for women do not want Mike Tyson, an unrepentant convicted rapist, in New Zealand. We will never support him being held up as a role model for our young men.

Willie Jackson, the Chairperson of NUMA (National Urban Maori Association), is supporting Mike Tyson’s second visa application to enter New Zealand, on condition that he visit a South Auckland marae during his stay. Willie Jackson said that NUMA was looking for motivation from Tyson because he had "turned his life around", and that NUMA would like to see him educate some of the troubled youth they work with in South Auckland.

Backing Tyson’s visit to New Zealand gives young men the wrong message as he has never admitted his crimes and continues to share his destructive, misogynist beliefs and views about women, especially victims of sexual violence and their supporters. Supporting Tyson shows astonishing disrespect for the many thousands of victims of domestic and sexual abuse who have been harmed by aggressive men like him.

Tyson still proclaims he is innocent of the rape for which he was sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted in 1991. He still holds an odious attitude towards women and he is a self-confessed “prostitute hunter”; it seems that women appear to have one purpose to Tyson – sex, hard-core. Only last year, he said of Sarah Palin, “She could always get boned out by a black person — a vote to bang her... You want [Palin] to be with somebody like [X] getting up in there. Pushing her guts up in the back of her head! ...— yeah baby! Imagine Palin with a big old black stallion ripping — yeehaw!”