When bystanders fail
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Kathy Marks
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Kathy Marks’ biography and other articles by this writer
WINTER is a hectic time on Pitcairn Island: the arrowroot crop is ready for harvesting, as are the wild beans that sprout in profusion, clambering over bushes and twining themselves around tree trunks. The sugarcane, too, stands tall in the wind, and once cut has to be processed within days, otherwise it starts to lose its sweetness.
The tin-roofed shed where inhabitants of the South Pacific island gather for this communal task - crushing the cane to extract the juice, then thickening it into a syrup - is on the fringes of Adamstown, Pitcairn's one, slightly ramshackle village. Swaddling the shed are thickets of banana palms, and it was here, in the mid-1990s, just metres from the whirl of molasses-making, that ten-year-old Belinda was gagged with a T-shirt, held down and raped in turn by two brothers.
I used to pass that shed every day, while covering the trials in 2004 of seven Pitcairn men accused of sexually assaulting children over the previous four decades. The little shack was near a dirt track leading to the courthouse and village, and after I had heard Belinda's account of being cornered in a banana grove, the sight of it always filled me with dread. It seemed to symbolise the darkness at the heart of this community, where young girls had been preyed on for as long as anyone could remember - ever since, perhaps, the Bounty mutineers landed here with twelve Tahitian women, most of them abducted.
Places scarred by exceptionally violent events can feel oppressive, as if the atmosphere were suffused with the suffering of victims. That struck me powerfully when I visited Port Arthur a few years ago, and likewise at Tuol Seng prison in Phnom Penh, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and murdered. On Pitcairn, living among the rapists and their families for six uneasy weeks, I felt at times like I was suffocating. Even the island itself appeared malign, with a brooding physical presence that was almost overwhelming; climbing the steep, muddy trails carved through the cloying tangle of vegetation, and watching waves the size of an apartment block crash against the cliff tops, I had the notion that this spot - a volcanic rock planted in the middle of the world's biggest ocean - was never meant to be inhabited.
In 1790, however, it proved an ideal refuge for nine of the sailors from His Majesty's Armed Vessel Bounty, fleeing the wrath of the Royal Navy after their celebrated uprising against Captain William Bligh. As well as being a natural fortress, the island had been wrongly charted; it was eighteen years before an American whaler stumbled upon Fletcher Christian and his followers, who had burnt the Bounty to the waterline. Still home to their descendants, Pitcairn even nowadays remains formidably isolated, with no airstrip or safe anchorage and only an infrequent boat service linking it with the nearest populated place, the French Polynesian island of Mangareva, a choppy thirty-two hours away.
That isolation - which almost takes your breath away when you ascend to Pitcairn's summit and survey the nothingness stretching to the horizon in every direction - was, no doubt, a crucial factor in the evolution of the sexual abuse. It may also help to account for the sheer scale of it: British detectives assigned to the investigation - Pitcairn is still a British overseas territory - believe that every girl was a victim, and virtually every man an offender. Yet it seemed to me, while I was on the island, and later, while researching a book on the case, that geography was only part of the picture. It did not explain how children could be treated so brutally, nor did it illuminate the other question that still gnaws at me: why did no one who knew what was happening to the girls - and some of the boys, too, though it's not clear how many - make any effort to halt it?
I found myself reflecting on evil. It's rather unfashionable these days; apart from the odd flurry of interest in the wake of, for instance, Anders Behring Brevik's deadly rampage in Norway in 2011, it seldom figures in public debate. I'd always baulked at the idea of evil, with its supernatural overtones and crude absolutism, but as I immersed myself in this intensely disturbing story, thoughts of it kept insinuating themselves into my brain. I wondered how this strange little place had gone rotten - and how close to the surface of our own societies, theoretically more civilised, evil might lurk. And I asked myself: how many of us, born or thrust into circumstances similar to Pitcairn, would, like successive generations of islanders, succumb to our worst instincts?
Hanging on the wall of my kitchen in Sydney is a wooden shark with real shark's teeth. It was carved by Terry Young who, like the rest of the Pitcairn community, made a good living from the Pacific cruise ships that visit the island in summer. A taciturn mountain of a man, Terry - whose ancestor was the mutineer Edward Young - looked after his ailing widowed mother, Vula, with singular devotion. During the 1980s, he raped a twelve-year-old girl approximately once a week, having indecently assaulted her since she was six.
The girl, whom I call Marion in my book, Pitcairn: Paradise Lost (HarperCollins, 2008), never told anyone what was happening to her; she felt ashamed, she explained to the New Zealand judges presiding over the trials in Pitcairn's dilapidated courthouse. There was, though, no one to tell, for the policemen and magistrates were abusing, too; British diplomats were based thousands of kilometres away in Wellington; and VHF radio and a highly erratic postal system were the sole means of communication. To point the finger, anyway, would have been almost unimaginable in those claustrophobic confines: five square kilometres of rock and a tortuously interrelated population that has long hovered at around fifty.
Until 1999, none of the victims spoke up. As Jennifer, who was raped four times by Steve Christian - a former mayor and the father of Belinda's two assailants, Randy and Shawn - told the British-appointed judges: ‘It just seemed to be...how the girls are treated, as though they're a sex thing. Men could do what they want with them. They seemed to be a rule unto themselves... That's the way of life on Pitcairn.'
Jennifer's parents, and other adults, must have known what was going on. Secrets are a scarce commodity on Pitcairn; and besides, most fathers were offending, while mothers had been abused themselves. Yet the majority of parents turned a blind eye; they made no attempt to protect their daughters, and in living memory it appears that only one publicly complained. ‘It was shoved under the carpet,' according to Charlotte, another of Steve Christian's victims. ‘It's an act that everyone on the island knew was happening, and nobody wanted to say it was wrong and deal with it.'
Indefensible though that may be, parents were not the only adults who could have intervened. For much of the twentieth century Pitcairn had a resident New Zealand teacher, and also a Seventh Day Adventist minister, sent out from Australia or New Zealand - the locals had converted to Adventism in 1890. Many of these people, who lived at the heart of the community for two years, working and socialising alongside the islanders, became aware of the children's plight. Allen Cox was one of Marion's teachers; returning to Pitcairn in 2003, at the height of the scandal, he observed in an email to his son, Andrew: ‘I have no doubt the guys are guilty as sin. The sexual abuse has been going on from the time of the Bounty.' Walter Ferguson was the pastor during Cox's first stint; his wife, Phyllis, was approached by a parishioner whose daughter, a friend of Marion's, had been raped. Like Cox, the Fergusons took the matter no further.
Two teachers tried to warn the British government in the 1950s that something was amiss, but were not taken seriously. And that was it: none of the other outsiders posted to Pitcairn in a professional capacity ever relayed their concerns. The children were left to their fate, and when the veil of silence was finally lifted, it was not by a parent, or teacher, or minister of the church, but by Belinda, the girl in the banana grove. She was still just fifteen years old.
ANCIENT PETROGLYPHS GOUGED into a cliff face indicate that Pitcairn, perched midway between New Zealand and Chile, was occupied by Polynesians from about 800 to 1400 AD. Why they departed is not clear; at any rate, the place was empty when the mutineers alighted with their Tahitian ‘wives' and six native men. Modern Pitcairn's birth was soaked in blood; within a decade, all but one of the men were dead, murdered mostly in quarrels over women. The sole survivor, John Adams, then embraced Christianity, and the island, after being rediscovered, became renowned for its piety - which is one reason Britain, after hoisting the Union flag in 1838, left it largely to its own devices.
But while the community displayed a virtuous face to visitors, reports filtered out of incest, rapes, abortions, wife-beating, illegitimate births and unexplained ‘accidental' deaths; by the early twentieth century, a pattern of girls being ‘seduced' or ‘broken in' by adult men had established itself. Those girls, in more recent times, included two sisters, Isobel and Jeanie, whom I interviewed in New Zealand in 2007. While talking to Isobel, I realised we were almost the same age, and I contemplated the cruel lottery of birth. One spin of the wheel and you were condemned to a nightmarish childhood on Pitcairn; another spin and you grew up in a loving family in England.
From the ages of nine and seven, respectively, Isobel and Jeanie were raped by Terry Young's elder brother, Brian, one of thirty alleged offenders identified by detectives. By the time the abuse came to light, some of those men were dead or too frail to stand trial; ten ended up going to court - seven of them on the island, where they comprised two-thirds of the adult male population; three in New Zealand, where many expatriates live. All except one were convicted and five of them were jailed, serving their sentences in a purpose-built prison on Pitcairn. Brian, who spent the longest behind bars, was released after just over two years. (Invoking ‘unique' circumstances, the judges had been extraordinarily lenient.)
During the 1970s, Brian would arrive at the sisters' house on his motorbike and, with their mother's permission, whisk them off, supposedly to help him collect firewood. He would then drive them to an old hut in a secluded location and assault them in turn, sometimes in front of each other. How could he - how could any of the men - do that to children? Dimly, I've come to understand, I think, some of their motives. There was the sense of entitlement, created by Pitcairn's swashbuckling history. There was the macho culture, which encouraged sex with young girls as a mark of virility. There was the ingrained nature of the abuse, which was handed down from father to son, and there was the isolation, thanks to which men felt untouchable. Isolation may also have dislocated the islanders from mainstream social norms, albeit only to a degree - from 1914, when the Panama Canal opened, they were travelling to and from New Zealand regularly.
How did the abuse of children become routine - virtually institutionalised - in the British colony? I found myself reading about the atrocities in Rwanda, Cambodia, Nazi Germany; while I draw the parallel very cautiously - no one died on Pitcairn, although countless lives were blighted, and two sisters committed suicide in mysterious circumstances - what those places have in common, it seems to me, is the way darkness seeped into every corner of the society. And in each instance, the evil - if you want to call it that - was, on some level, state-sanctioned, which presumably explains why it proliferated so vigorously.
Cruelty, though, begins and ends with individuals, and most of us could not envisage taking part in killing, torture and genocide. Adam Morton, a professor of philosophy at the University of Alberta, Canada, argues in On Evil (Routledge, 2004) that evildoers have to overcome an innate aversion to harming others. Ideology can assist in breaching the barrier, he writes, and so can ethnic prejudice, group dynamics and a prevailing culture. Several of those factors were at play on Pitcairn, where child abuse was - if not openly condoned - widely tolerated; certainly, there was no stigma attached. Closer to home, dozens of men participated in orchestrated pack-rapes in the northern Queensland town of Ingham during the 1970s, with the community's knowledge and tacit acceptance.
In Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty (Penguin, 2011), Simon Baron-Cohen advocates that evil be understood, primarily, as a lack of empathy; a Cambridge University professor of developmental psychopathology, Baron-Cohen also contends that a circuit within the brain determines where we all lie on an ‘empathy spectrum' of zero to six degrees. (Psychopaths score zero.) Yet as Stanley Milgram's experiments at Yale University in 1961 demonstrated, empathy can be readily suspended: under orders from an authority figure, two-thirds of his subjects administered what they thought were potentially lethal electric shocks to other participants.
The evidence, moreover, suggests that empathy does not necessarily preclude sexual offending, according to Paul Wilson, a forensic psychologist and professor of criminology at the Gold Coast's Bond University.