The Independent (London, England); April 08, 2003; Marks, Kathy

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Marks, Kathy

The Independent (London, England)

April 08, 2003


THE FUTURE of the tiny Pacific island of Pitcairn is in doubt after nine men - a quarter of the population - were charged with sex crimes against girls from their own community.
The charges affect nearly every family on Pitcairn, a pinprick of volcanic rock 3,000 miles from New Zealand, which was settled by Fletcher Christian and his fellow Bounty mutineers in 1790. They follow a two-year investigation by Kent police, who uncovered dozens of allegations of rape and sexual abuse by girls who grew up on the island.
The Pitcairn public prosecutor, Simon Moore, said in a statement issued through the British High Commission in Wellington, New Zealand, yesterday that the men would appear in court tomorrow for a pre-trial hearing. Further charges are expected to be laid against 10 other men who are former Pitcairn islanders living in New Zealand.
Mr Moore said last year that he intended to lay charges for the rape of girls as young as seven and 10,
...
Read The Independent (London, England): Rape trials threaten to destroy South Sea island.(Foreign News) with your FREE TRIAL
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Rape case testing British claim to Pitcairn Island

AFP AND AP , AUCKLAND AND WELLINGTON
Tuesday, Feb 03, 2004,Page 5

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Lawyers for a group of Pitcairn Island men accused of involvement in decades of sex abuse produced documents dating back to 1838 in an Australian court yesterday to argue that Britain has no jurisdiction over the case.

Thirteen islanders face multiple sex charges with women and girls as young as three years old in a case that is testing London's claim to Pitcairn. Some of the accusations date back 40 years.

The tiny, isolated South Pacific island, 2,160km southeast of Tahiti and 5,300km from New Zealand, is administered by Britain, although residents have resisted British laws since settling there after the 1789 mutiny on the HMS Bounty.

Most of the residents are descendants of the famous mutineers on the Bounty. Defense lawyers claim the islanders severed all ties with Britain when they burned the Bounty on Jan. 23, 1790. They have been arguing that the accused should be tried by the Pitcairn community.

In the Pitcairn Supreme Court, which is sitting in South Auckland, former Australian judge Adrian Cook said that he had uncovered historic documents in England that were "immensely significant."

Cook, who is representing seven of the accused, said the papers included acquisition documents drawn up by Captain Elliott of the British warship HMS Fly, which visited the islands in November 1838.

He described the matter as of fundamental importance and requested more time to study the documents he had found in England last month, adding he also needed to resolve the issue of copyright on the documents and arrange for expert opinion from England.

As well as the documents relating to the Fly's visit, Cook said he would also offer as evidence written reports to the British Admiralty from warships which visited the islands between 1830 and 1910.

The court granted Cook a delay until March 12, when he must file new documentary evidence. Pro-secutors were given until March 26 to reply and the court would deliver a decision on April 19.

Prosecutors want the trial held in New Zealand because it would be virtually impossible on Pitcairn, which has no airstrip or harbor and insufficient accommodation for court officials.
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Growing up on Pitcairn: 'We all thought sex was like food on table'
By Kathy Marks on Pitcairn Island

29 September 2004

The women of Pitcairn Island are angry. They say the outside world has a skewed perception of how their tiny community functions. They believe their menfolk, seven of whom go on trial today on child sex abuse charges, are victims of a miscarriage of justice.

Yesterday they spoke at a rare public meeting attended by 13 women from three generations, almost the entire adult female population of Pitcairn. Their message was that the men had committed no crimes. The island, they said, had a tradition of under-age sex that dated from the days when it was settled by Fletcher Christian and the Bounty mutineers.

Their voices cracked with emotion, but they did not present a picture of unity. Some stayed silent and appeared ill at ease. The most voluble included women closely related to the men facing 55 counts of rape, indecent assault and gross indecency against children aged as young as five. Six other islanders now living in Australia and New Zealand have been charged with similar offences.

The prosecution will paint a picture of an isolated community where child sex abuse was systematic and widespread. But the women said their girls matured young sexually, and no one on the island, a British dependency, had been raped. "Our men are being portrayed as hardened criminals," one said.

The meeting was at a large, airy house called Big Fence, home of Olive Christian. Mrs Christian, 48, whose husband, Steve, is mayor of Pitcairn, said of her girlhood: "We all thought sex was like food on the table."

Her daughter, Mrs Darralyn Griffiths, 28, said she started having sex at 13, "and I felt hot shit about it, too". Meralda Warren, 45, said her sex life began at 12. Nadine Christian, 32, said: "It was just the way it was. It goes way back. It's been happening for generations. You have to remember the kids here don't have any entertainment." But others hinted at cracks in this image of carefree sexual precocity. Carol Warren, 51, said a Pitcairn man tried to rape her when she was 10. She also said she complained to police about her daughter's relationship with an older married man, which began when she was 13.

Despite her own experience, Mrs Warren said she was certain no girl on the island had ever had sex against her will. She said it was "sick" to have sex with a girl before she reached puberty, and she could not believe any islander could have done that. Mrs Christian added: "There are no secrets on Pitcairn, I can tell you."

The women said the alleged victims in the criminal case had been browbeaten and bribed by investigators. Mrs Warren said her two daughters - Darralyn and 22-year-old Charlene - had retracted statements they had made years before. So had other women.

Charlene said detectives offered her money to testify, although she agreed they had been referring to compensation for victims of crime. She dropped the case against her alleged assailant, she said, because, "when I really thought about it, it was half and half ... I wanted it as bad as him".

Sources familiar with the case say some alleged victims withdrew after intense pressure from their families. "They were told they'd be thrown out of the house, their fathers would commit suicide, the whole island would fold," one source said.

Several women saw the case as a British plot to jail their able-bodied men and "close" the island. Meralda Warren said: "They've picked on all the young men, the backbone of this place." Pitcairn is reliant on its men to maintain roads and man the longboats. Mrs Christian said: "If you put the men in jail, you might as well pack the island up and throw it away."


1 October 2004 13:45
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When will the goddamn governments get their noses out of our crotches?

Interesting story...

I guess that answers the question of what happens when you put a group of men together with a bunch of teenage girls on a tiny island 3,000 miles away from the nearest law enforcement. Shocker? I don't think so.

Thanks very interesting.

Hunter

Sounds like the characters in 'The Island' weren't so farfetched after all.

I heard that Ben is planning on moving there.

Ben is already there. He bought the Island. They were sellnig it for 1.6 million and he said no way here is 2 million.

Ben bought the island from the mutineers back in 1790. It was a present for his main squeeze back then, Booty Pie.

http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1151&id=1322142004

Author backs sex islanders

BEST-SELLING author Colleen McCullough has branded the sex convictions of six Pitcairn Islanders "an absolute disgrace", saying they were merely following a Polynesian custom of having sex with young girls.

McCullough, the author of The Thorn Birds, lives on Australia’s Norfolk Island, a former penal colony home to a number of Pitcairn descendants. She said: "They are as much Polynesian as anything else. It’s Polynesian to break your girls in at 12."

http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1151&id=1171962004

Edinburgh Evening News
Fri 8 Oct 2004
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Second islander admits sex assault

A SECOND Pitcairn Island man has pleaded guilty to child sex charges, admitting he indecently assaulted young girls as he gave them rides on his four-wheel motorbike around the isolated South Pacific island.

Tractor driver Dave Brown, 49, also admitted he put his hand down a girl’s bikini as she swam off the island in Bounty Bay, a rocky cove where 18th-century Bounty mutineers sank their stolen British ship.

Brown maintained not guilty pleas to two charges of gross indecency with a five-year-old girl and her six-year-old friend and denied another ten charges of indecently assaulting a girl when she was aged between 12 and 16, said Radio New Zealand.

Seven Pitcairn men - half of the male population - face 55 charges of rape and underage sex dating back more than 40 years.

The descendants of the Bounty mutineers claim underage sex has been a "tradition" since the mutineers landed with their Tahitian women in 1790.

Pitcairn mayor Steve Christian, 53, a descendant of Fletcher Christian who led the Bounty mutiny in 1789, was the "leader of the pack" on the island and believed he had a right to have sex with young girls, the prosecution has told the court.

Earlier in the week, Pitcairn postmaster Dennis Christian, 49, also a descendant of Fletcher Christian, pleaded guilty to three charges, which include assaulting a 12-year-old girl.

Pitcairn is the last British territory in the South Pacific and has a population of just 47.

The seven charged men have not been imprisoned during their trial, but allowed to go about their daily routine as they are vital for the operation of the island community.

The British Government has had to ship in judges, police, a jail, court officials and a handful of reporters for the trial, which is expected to last for about six weeks. A courtroom has been erected in the island’s small, timber community hall. The sex charges against the men follow a report by a British policewoman stationed on the island in 1999.

A new six-cell jail, built in case the men are found guilty, is currently home to a group of British police officers. Police have confiscated all the islanders’ guns for the duration of the trial, but release guns for island hunting expeditions.



2-10-1462_1621713%2C00.html,http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1621713,00.html

Island rape trials a 'disgrace'
16/11/2004 15:03 - (SA)
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Sydney - Best-selling author Colleen McCullough said six men found guilty of a string of sex attacks on Pitcairn Island were following a Polynesian custom of having sex with young girls and called their convictions "an absolute disgrace," a newspaper reported on Tuesday.

McCullough, the author of the 1977 international best seller The Thorn Birds, lives on Australia's Norfolk Island, a former penal colony that is home to a number of Pitcairn Island descendants.

Late last month, six Pitcairn men were convicted of rapes and sex attacks dating back as far as 40 years on the remote island, which is located midway between New Zealand and South America and is home to descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian wives.

"They are as much Polynesian as anything else," McCullough told The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. "It's Polynesian to break your girls in at 12."

Trials were a disgrace

McCullough said the British-led rape trials were "an absolute disgrace" and should not have interfered with local customs.

"These are indigenous customs and should not be touched," she said. "It's hypocritical too. Does anybody object when Muslims follow their customs? Nobody's afraid of 50 Polynesians, but they are very afraid of a million Muslims."

But Karen Willis, a rape crisis counsellor, said child rape is not an accepted practice in any culture.

"This is just one of those myths," she said. "It's not a cultural thing. It's about patriarchy and male power."

Willis said some societies do initiate children into sexual relations at a young age, but celebration and ritual are key.

"In Pitcairn it was done in secrecy, and that's one of the main differences between sexual assault and normal sexual relations," she said.

Nothing to do with culture

Children who experience sexual assault often develop depression, phobias, flashbacks and panic attacks as adults, Willis said.

"It's nothing to do with culture. It will have an impact and it will be lifelong," she said.

Most Pitcairn Islanders are descended from the mutineers of the HMS Bounty and a handful of Polynesians. About one third of Norfolk Island's 1800 residents are descended from the 194 Pitcairners who settled in the abandoned penal colony in 1856.

McCullough has lived on Norfolk Island for 20 years and is married to a native Norfolk Islander who claims to be a direct descendant of several Bounty mutineers.


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Guilty: The Verdicts
That Shamed Pitcairn Island
By Kathy Marks
The Independent - UK
10-28-4


One by one, they stood in the dock, all large men of imposing build. Until recently, they had acted like kings, swaggering around their tiny empire. Yesterday, in a sweltering courtroom on Pitcairn Island, they were exposed as bullies, rapists and abusers of children. Five men, including the island's mayor, Steve Christian, were found guilty after one of the most extraordinary cases in British criminal history. A sixth, Dennis Christian, had already entered a guilty plea. Only one Pitcairner, Jay Warren, left court without a blemish, cleared of indecently assaulting a young girl at picturesque Bounty Bay.

The defendants were among 31 men named as abusers by women who had grown up in the remote British dependency during the past half-century. Seven of those women testified by video link from Auckland, and the three judges - shipped in from New Zealand, along with lawyers and court officials - believed them, almost without exception.

The verdicts were a resounding affirmation for the witnesses, who resisted years of family and community pressure to withdraw their complaints. They also vindicated the work of Kent Police detectives, sent to Pitcairn in 2000 to investigate one allegation, only to uncover systematic abuse of young girls that dated back at least 40 years.

Detective Inspector Robert Vinson, the chief investigating officer, said the judgements "sent a strong message that the abuse of children is not acceptable in any culture, anywhere, and Pitcairn Island is no exception".

The verdict was the dramatic climax to a month of harrowing evidence about life on a South Pacific island romanticised for its links with the Bounty mutiny. Three generations of Pitcairn men stood in the dock, and all three generations - including Len Brown, 78 and barefoot - were found culpable.

Rivulets of sweat ran down the face of Steve Christian, the island's charismatic tribal chieftain, as Chief Justice Charles Blackie pronounced him guilty of five rapes. As a young man, Christian, now 53, assumed the right to sexually initiate girls of 12 or 13, who then became members of his personal "harem". Randy, taller than his father and broad as a rugby prop, sweated equally profusely as he too saw prison loom. He was found guilty of four rapes and five indecent assaults. Randy was the "young cub" who emulated his father - the natural heir of a family that ruled Pitcairn with an iron grip while preying on its most vulnerable inhabitants. Like father, like son. Steve Christian raped a 12-year-old girl under a banyan tree while two friends held her down. Twenty years later, Randy pinned down a 10-year-old in a banana grove so that a friend could rape her. Then they swapped places and Randy took his turn. Randy's brother, Sean, was cautioned by police in 1996 about a consensual liaison with a 12-year-old girl.

For years, Steve Christian was the face of Pitcairn, travelling the world to promote the island. After he was charged, and while still enjoying anonymity, he went to New York and addressed the UN committee on decolonisation. No one outside Pitcairn knew that, in his heyday, it was he who set the tone for men who felt they could rape young girls with impunity.

Ironically, it was his son's actions that led to the culture of endemic abuse being uncovered. Randy's principal victim told a friend, who told her mother, and the complaint ended up with Gail Cox, a Kent police constable stationed temporarily on Pitcairn in 1999. Ms Cox, the first British officer ever posted to Pitcairn, began an inquiry that turned into a massive investigation. Detectives travelled the world several times, interviewing women who had grown up on the island and now live in New Zealand, Australia, Norfolk Island and England. As they went, "we got disclosure after disclosure ... it was staggering," said one officer.

While the women's testimony suggests that few men from the past three generations are untainted, anecdotal evidence indicates the abuse began even further back. One middle-aged woman on Pitcairn claims "it was the same in my great-grandparents' day". Another recalls her father asserting that girls of 12 needed to be "broken in" - the precise phrase used to describe Steve Christian's alleged conduct a generation later. "That was the belief, and I think it's always been there," she says of her father's attitude.

When did it start? Many people believe the abuse took root in 1790, when Fletcher Christian and his men abducted a group of Tahitian women and sailed with them to Pitcairn. The early years of the community were marked by brutality and violence, as well as fights over women.

By the time an American sealer arrived 18 years later, all but one of the mutineers, John Adams, were dead. Adams was surrounded by women and children who all called him "Father". In the ensuing years, Pitcairn always had a dominant male figure. Today that man is Steve Christian.

Some believe the mutineers' mentality still prevails. With Pitcairn left to its own devices for decades by British administrators, the men were able to do as they pleased. They lived in an isolated, male-dominated society and were accountable to no one.

Asked why the six guilty men did what they did, one source replies: "Because they could. Because that's the way it was. There was a power base of influential men, and no one was going to go against them." At the centre of that power base was Steve Christian, head of a so-called "inner circle" of men who - at least until now - have run the island between them. Nothing happens without the say-so of "the boys", and they control the longboats, the umbilical cord that links Pitcairn with the outside world. All of those men have passed through the dock in Adamstown. Indeed, before a court order suppressing their identities was lifted, one observer noted that anyone curious to know their names needed only to "look in the back of the longboat".

Over the long years of abuse, the victims had no one to tell. Their assailants included magistrates and police officers, while their own male relatives were, allegedly, abusing young girls themselves. A few parents, it is said, even pushed their daughters in the direction of influential men. Some girls suffered blighted childhoods in which they were abused by half a dozen men. They could not tell, and they could not leave - at least until they went to school in New Zealand in their mid-teens. Some have never returned, and never will.

While the men abused, the women - including the mothers of some victims - colluded. And when Pitcairn's silent victims finally found a voice, thanks to Ms Cox, it was the girls who were blamed for speaking out rather than the men who abused them. One middle-aged woman calls her daughter, who was allegedly raped at 12 by a man in his 30s, a "silly idiot" for making a complaint. "She knew what she was doing," the mother says. "She wanted it as much as him."

The rapes and molestations took place in every conceivable situation. Girls were assaulted during spear-fishing trips and games of hide and seek, on quad bikes and at children's parties. Every scenic spot on Pitcairn is a crime site. Aute Valley, Garnett's Ridge, The Hollow, Hulianda - postcard-pretty places with quaint names, all defiled by men who used their superior strength and age to force themselves on girls who had barely achieved puberty.

For Steve Christian and his cronies, sex was about power. For others, such as the old men who groped little girls opportunistically, it meant fleeting gratification. And for others, the abuse stemmed, perhaps, from their frustration at the limited pool of women on a 2.5 mile-square lump of rock in the middle of the Pacific. Even family members were not immune. The court heard allegations of incest.

Small wonder that many visitors remarked on the sexual precocity of Pitcairn's children, who - according to one woman - simulated sex with each other from the age of five. But even the trend for girls to have babies from the age of 12, confirmed by historical records, did not shake British administrators out of their torpor.

One woman, now 51 and still deeply traumatised, described a nightmare childhood of repeated assaults. "That's the way it is on Pitcairn," she told the court. "You get abused, you get raped. It's a normal way of life on Pitcairn." The witnesses quashed the myth, perpetuated by relatives of the defendants, that prosecutors targeted men engaged in consensual under-age sex. They painted a picture of a dysfunctional society where men raped young girls almost casually. Many of the women had bottled up the abuse for decades, disclosing it only when approached by police.

And yesterday came the verdicts. Len Brown twice raped a teenager in a watermelon patch. Dave Brown, his 49-year-old son, carried out six indecent assaults. Terry Young, 46, raped a 12-year-old girl every week for years, assaulting her every time she went out to collect firewood. All six of the guilty men will be sentenced on Thursday, but they will remain free on bail until legal argument about the legitimacy of the trials has been heard in Auckland and London next year. Until then, their convictions will not be formally entered.

The verdicts left the fractious and bitterly divided community in shock. Few of the 47 islanders had stepped inside court to hear the evidence. None of the six men commented afterwards. Steve Christian, who cracked a joke on his way into court, departed stony-faced. Dave Brown was in tears. Despite the legal delays, it seems certain that at least three - and possibly all six - will serve sentences in the imposing new prison that all seven helped build.

The Chief Justice, Charles Blackie, poured scorn on Steve Christian's claim that his victims consented. Commenting on one girl, he said: "She was 12 years old. He was 21. She was young, naive and vulnerable. She was secreted into the bushes and there the accused took advantage of her. There had been no affection, kissing or romantic connection. She did not want it to happen." There cannot have been a single adult on the island who did not know what was allegedly going on through the years. Yet little was said, and nothing was done.

The verdicts will leave a power vacuum on Pitcairn, with both Steve Christian and Randy, who is chairman of a key island committee, under pressure to resign. Steve Christian's sister, Brenda, is planning to run for mayor in council elections next month.

While the defendants' relatives have warned that Pitcairn will collapse if so many able-bodied men are jailed, islanders unconnected with the case disagree. They say there will still be enough men to crew the longboats and carry out other communal work. They regard the trials as a necessary healing process that will enable Pitcairn to survive and move forward.

Mike Christian, an Englishman married to Brenda Christian, said: "This is a watershed. We have to make sure of that. We have to make the island safe for children."

THE GUILTY MEN

Steve Christian, the island's mayor, who claims to be a direct descendant of the 'Bounty' mutineer leader Fletcher Christian, was convicted of five rapes and cleared of four indecent assaults and one rape.

His son, Randy Christian, was convicted of four rapes and five indecent assault charges, but cleared of one rape and two indecent assaults.

Len Brown, 78 was convicted of two rapes.

His son Dave Brown, was found guilty of nine indecent assaults, but was cleared of four charges of indecent assault and two of gross indecency.

Terry Young was convicted of one rape and six indecent assaults but was cleared of one indecent assault charge.

Dennis Christian pleaded guilty at the trial to one indecent assault and two sexual assault charges.

Jay Warren the island's magistrate, was cleared of indecent assault.

©2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. All rights reserved http://news.independent.co.uk/world/australasia/story.jsp?story=576045


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Pitcairn Island men found guilty of rape

October 25 2004 at 09:38AM

Sydney - Six of the seven Pitcairn Island men charged with raping and indecently assaulting girls as young as 12 were found guilty by a British court on the remote South Pacific island, a British official said on Monday.

The men, descendants of 18th century Bounty mutineers, had argued that under-age sex was a tradition dating back to 1790 when mutineers arrived on the island with their Tahitian women.

But their victims, now adults who testified via video from New Zealand, said they were treated as "sex things" as girls and raped at will under banyan trees or in garden sheds on Pitcairn.

The men will be sentenced later this week but will not be sent to jail until 2005 at the earliest due to legal wrangling over whether Britain has jurisdiction over the island.

'Steve Christian, the mayor, has been found guilty of five rapes and a number of sexual assaults'
"Six of the seven have been found guilty," said British High Commission spokesperson Bryan Nicolson in Wellington, New Zealand.

"Steve Christian, the mayor, has been found guilty of five rapes and a number of sexual assaults," Nicolson said. Christian, 53, is a descendant of Fletcher Christian, who led the Bounty mutiny.

Christian was the "leader of the pack" on the island and believed he had a right to have sex with young girls, the prosecution told the court during the trial, held inside Pitcairn's community hall.

Pitcairn is the last British territory in the South Pacific, a dot in the ocean 2 160km south-east of Tahiti.

Pitcairn, with an area of just 5km2, has no safe harbour, is too rocky for an airstrip, has no paved roads, no sewage treatment system and no landline telephones.

The men have been granted the right to challenge British sovereignty
Visitors must fly to an outlying Tahitian island and then travel by boat for 36 hours to get there, ending their journey in a longboat, riding the surf that crashes onto the island.

Britain built a makeshift court inside Pitcairn's community hall and shipped in judges, lawyers and police for the trial.

The charges against the men, which date back more than 40 years, followed a report by a British policewoman stationed on the island in 1999.

The Pitcairn men are challenging Britain's right to prosecute them, arguing that British sovereignty ended when the mutineers sank the Bounty off the island in 1790.

The men have been granted the right to challenge British sovereignty. They will present their case to the Privy Council, the highest court of appeal for Britain's overseas territories. The case is set down for 2005 and, if the appeal is upheld, the verdicts would be overturned.

Many islanders fear that if the seven are jailed then the Pitcairn community, population 47, could not survive.

Many of the men operate the island's only boats, which are lifelines to the outside world, ferrying in essential supplies