Complaint to SBS

24/4/2022

You claim to attempt to be committed to "preserving the trust and confidence of all Australians, who rely on SBS’s editorial independence and integrity across all its content." 

Yet you place on SBS News a tweet by Katherine Deves that read
"Half of all males with trans identities are sex offenders, compared with less than 20% for the rest of male estate. That should tell you something". 
You then quickly highlighted the part of the tweet that said "Half of all males with trans identities are sex offenders" with the audio that Katherine Deves "claimed that half of all men with trans identities are sex offenders”.  I believe you knew this was a misrepresentation of the meaning of the tweet and I believe your intention was to slur the character of Katherine Deves.

When Deve says "male estate" she is talking about the male prison estate and the figures she references are from a court case from July 2021 FDJ Vs SECRETARY OF STATE FOR JUSTICE. The link is here: https://fairplayforwomen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/FDJ-v-SSJ-judgment-approved-as-handed-down-on-02.07.21-002.pdf

If you go to item 50 in the document you will see;
"the qualifying population for allocation to the women’s estate in accordance with the policies is the known transgender women prisoner population, over 50% of whom have committed sexual offenses. It is known that a history of sexual offending is an indicator of a risk of future sexual offending." 

These figures are also backed up here https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42221629 including the seriousness of the offenses among the prisoners. 

Katherine is launching an argument in this tweet for maintaining a single-sex female estate. Ben Fordham on 2GB realised this; https://www.2gb.com/ben-fordhams-fiery-clash-with-nsw-treasurer-over-attempts-to-cancel-katherine-deves/ . So journalism is still being performed somewhere. 

In the tweet, Katherine was highlighting that there are two conclusions to the data that half of the males who qualify to enter the female estate are sex offenders and that is;

1.  That males who are sex offenders and are trans-identifying in order to access the female estate OR
2. that trans-identified males have a higher rate of male pattern sexual violence. 

I assume Deves conclusion would have been 1, but the statistic backs up the preference for a female prison estate either way if you consider the safety of women the goal. 

Deves is a feminist who is trying to keep sex offenders from vulnerable women and you are insinuating that she hates trans people. Shame on you for willfully misrepresenting a woman who is in hiding because of death threats.  Your program will encourage more threats toward Ms. Deves because of the shoddy journalism of this piece and the deliberate deceitful miss-framing of her words.  

I would like to see an apology to Ms. Deves for the way you conducted the presentation of her deleted tweet, while you knew she was in a vulnerable position precisely because of the misinformation proliferated by the media. 

I will be publishing this complaint on my substack and talking about it in my writing.  I write for the Spectator OZ under the name Edie Wyatt