By Gwynne Dyer, ContributorIS IT 'culturally acceptable' for adult men to have sex with 12-year-old girls if everybody is doing it? That is what the defence lawyers for the seven men half of the adult male population of Pitcairn Island who are currently on trial for sexual assault and child sex abuse extending back over the past 40 years have claimed. Some of the alleged 'victims' say so, too.
The family names on Pitcairn are English-sounding (Christian, Warren, Brown and Young) but the people are not English. They are descended from nine British sailors who mutinied against Captain Bligh on the warship Bounty in 1789, and from a dozen Tahitian women, whom they took with them when they sought out Pitcairn an isolated dot lost in the South Pacific to hide from the vengeance of the British navy.
MUTINEERS
Eight of the nine mutineers who settled on Pitcairn, a previously uninhabited island, died by violence within a decade. But the British navy did not find the little community for a generation, so there was no punishment and it has clung to the island, currently numbering 47 residents, for over two centuries.
On the British side, the Pitcairners' ancestors were brutalised sailors from a navy where violence was the first resort, not the last. On the Polynesian side, they came from a society that traditionally considered girls sexually mature at 12 years of age. Then they spent two centuries in almost complete isolation with no government, no courts and no police. No wonder they ended up a bit strange.
NORMAL SOCIETY
Without prejudging the guilt or innocence of the seven men on trial, it's clear that anybody found guilty of the crimes of which they are accused rape and child sexual abuse would go to jail for a very long time if they lived in a normal society. But in our own very large societies, only a tiny minority of men commit such crimes. It is obviously different when this behaviour becomes the norm, and is accepted even by most of the victims as normal. When you count the further six Pitcairn men, now living abroad, who face trial on similar charges next year, an absolute majority of the present generation of adult male Pitcairners are accused of rape and child molestation.
To say that a behaviour is 'cultural' does not make it acceptable, but it does argue for a different approach to those who have committed what the larger culture defines as crimes. The behaviour must change and the violence and abuse must stop, but if the British-run court finds all the accused men guilty and locks them up for five to 15 years, this little society will die. There will not even be enough grown men to man the longboats that go out to meet the passing cruise liners that are the island's main link with the outside world.
There are some among the Pitcairners who suspect that this is Britain's hidden goal to destroy the viability of Pitcairn society so that the islanders leave and Britain no longer has to spend money supporting them but the signs are that the colonial authorities have thought this through, and do not intend to shut Pitcairn Island down. During the 18 months since the seven men now on trial were first charged, they have been free on bail and employed in building a six-cell jail in the island's only settlement.
FUTURE HOME
The work paid well, even if they may be building their future home. At least it would be on the island, and the jail terms that are handed down, should they be found guilty, would probably be the sort of weekends-only sentences that would leave them free to go on supporting the community. It is hard for a big, rich society to reform the ways of a tiny one without mangling or crushing it in the process, but Britain does seem to be trying.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
