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ACC's most vulnerable clients are facing new obstacles in obtaining treatment as the rules around funding for sexual abuse therapy tighten.
Victims will have to prove mental injury before receiving counselling which will then be subject to new time limits.
The proposed changes will take place in mid-October.
Concerned counsellors say the proposed changes will force sexual abuse victims to admit the abuse in a daunting psychiatric assessment before ACC agrees to treatment.
The treatment will then be limited to only 16 sessions before another application has to be made.
"What we want is to give people certainty. We want them to know if they're covered and then have access to the support; now, counselling's only one of a range of supports that people might want in this situation," ACC's Denise Cosgrove told ONE News.
Labour believes sexual abuse victims may be re-traumatised because of the increase in waiting times for ACC to approve their counselling.
"The last thing a victim of sexual assault needs to face is lengthy dithering by the very agency which is supposed to fund their counselling," says Labour MP Lynne Dillay.
"They become very emotionally vulnerable and to start to have care for that distress, and then to have to stop; that's the unethical part of this," adds Psychiotherapists Association member Susan Hawthorne.
'Carol', who was only six years old when her father started raping her, believes she would not have been able to undergo the ACC-funded counselling she received ten years ago if the proposed new rules applied then.
"I can see that a number of people would be very self-destructive and I think for myself, I probably would've committed suicide,' she says.
It's the second change to funded treatment for victims of sexual abuse by the ACC this year. The corporation stopped making weekly payments to 170 people in June following a court ruling.
