British Court Rejects Pitcairn Appeal

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"Six men from remote Pitcairn Island on Monday lost their final appeal against their convictions for a string of sex attacks dating back 40 years on the tiny Pacific home to descendants of the HMS Bounty mutiny.

Britain's Privy Council, the final court of appeal for many British territories and former colonies, rejected the defendants' argument that English law did not apply on the tiny, central Pacific island, inhabited by fewer than 100 people.

Former Pitcairn Mayor Steve Christian and five others were convicted in October 2004 on charges including rape and indecent assault of mostly underage girls over a 40-year period.

Four of the men face prison terms after their appeals against the sex abuse convictions were dismissed. They had been released pending the outcome of the appeal but will now have to serve their sentences.

"I expect within days they will start serving sentences," said Pitcairn deputy governor Matthew Forbes."

http://www.forbes.com/infoimaging/feeds/ap/2006/10/30/ap3131681.html

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. good.

they took advantage of their situation, and never thought they would be held to account. hmmmmph!


disclaimer: I have no idea what the back-story on this is, but I felt the need to interject my opinion.

[Kagemusha]

2. Either they're completely innocent or very very guilty as sin

and trying to evade the consequences just because they're on some remote island as if the law doesn't apply to them.

Odds are on guilty as sin, though, from what I have heard.

[FarrenH]

3. I read a lot about this when it started

These guys are (IIRC) the descendants of 19th century mutineers who settled down with island women.

They're quite cut off from the rest of the world by virtue of remoteness and have lived their entire lives on the island.

An interesting dimension seems to be that many of the older women on the island, who had been subjected to the same thing in their youth, seemed to think the behaviour of the men was normal and expressed surprise at all the fuss when they first came under scrutiny.

Obviously this doesn't justify the behavior of these men in any way. Abused children will sometimes grow up to be abusers and even come to see excessive violence against children as a necessary part of upbringing (personally I think any violence against children is excessive).

But it does raise two interesting lines of thought. The first is that many people have a remarkable capacity for getting over trauma - and to a certain extent in modern Western society we keep wounds open and fresh by perpetuating the idea that someone is broken or scarred for life by trauma and requires constant counseling and sympathy to get over it. While I'm not implying that this is true in all cases I think some people are naturally resilient but are actually encouraged not to be by well-intentioned people who cannot conceive of the person getting over trauma so quickly.

The second is that, if this had gone on for hundreds of years, we'd probably be hearing a some arguments about it not being rape when understood in the context of the culture and so on. Only a few generations separates a "cultural practice" from a "crime".

[bleedingheart]

4. Actually there are cultures around the world that permit the

marriage of young girls to much older men.

The NY Times Magazine had an article about girls as young as 12 being married to 39 year old men in Afghanistan to pay for debts their fathers had.

[shrike]

6. Ballplayer Ty Cobb's mother was 12 when she married

his father. In 19th century America.

[bleedingheart]

8. I had an aunt married at 13...delivered her first child at 14

[Katzenjammer]

5. trauma

" in modern Western society we keep wounds open and fresh by perpetuating the idea that someone is broken or scarred for life by trauma and requires constant counseling and sympathy to get over it."

There's also the fact that in traditional, socialistic Polynesian societies sex is not the big deal freighted with property issues that it is in European-based societies. Our sexual pathologies don't exist there because there's no money or power bound to who's-screwing-whom.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. Fairly irrelevant here

since this is about simple rape:

"She was 12 years old. He was 21," he said. "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."
...
Two NZ police officers phoned the victims to tell them of the verdicts.

Senior Constable Karen Vaughan told TVNZ: "They were all extremely relieved, as if a lifetime of emotional turmoil has been concluded."

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/location/story.cfm?l_id=10&ObjectID=3604012

Sounds like there was a lot of trauma, after all. But that's what you'd expect from rape.

[Katzenjammer]

10. Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I intended.

In our culture, we treat even 'simple' rape as a crime worse than GBH. Our mythology is that someone who's been beaten and knifed during a mugging should recover psychologically approximately concurrently with full physical healing, but the rape victim is regarded as having had her very soul violated, and no one thinks her unusually fragile if she's still struggling with sequelae years later.

My thesis is that part of that comes from the way concerns about property have been mystified and transformed into pathological concerns about female sexuality.

[LostinVA]

7. Good -- well deserved and long overdue

Although I do remember some posters in the past claiming this was bad, because of "cultural differences." I personally don't think that can ever excuse child rape and sexual assault.