November 19, 2006
Child sexual abuse in Pitcairn -- and many other places
Probably we shouldn't be surprised at the constant thinness of social science research in newspaper articles. Here's another example in The Independent (London), in a story entitled: Pitcairn: The island of fear, which describes a TV documentary entitled Trouble in Paradise: The Pitcairn Story:
Jacqui Christian grew up on an island paradise in the Pacific. The childhood she describes sounds like every over-stressed family's fantasy in her adopted city, London: a serene tropical haven, with no cars, little contact with the outside world, where everyone is a neighbour, or family. "After school we could go riding our bikes or kite-flying anywhere on the island and not worry about being mugged," she says.But that wasn't the whole story. "There was this other side that we never talked about, where being a girl you always tried to avoid being anywhere with an adult male on your own. The older you got, the smarter you got about who was safe to be around and who wasn't." Her first memory of being sexually abused was when she was three years old.
Here's some interesting material from the investigation:
The two detectives who were assigned to Pitcairn under an investigation named Operation Unique, tried to make sense of what had been going on. They came to the conclusion that, because of an apparent lack of law and order, the adult men on the island felt it was their right to do whatever they wished. One man, said George, had admitted that he tried to get girls of 10 or under, because Christian "got them when they were 12, so he had to go younger".[Filmmaker Nick] Godwin has his own theory. "Women were certainly complicit in this," he says. "Although we didn't have time to go into it fully in a one-hour documentary, there was certainly evidence that women not only turned a blind eye, but offered up their daughters to older men in some cases.
"The widespread nature of this kind of activity, in my view, goes back to the island's origins, to the mutineers. We know that some of those women [they took] from Tahiti were very young, and I suspect many of those women may not have come of their own accord. We certainly have documentary evidence of men having sex with very young girls in Polynesia in that time. It was very much part of the culture then ... . All those things feed into the situation today."
OK, what is missing from this?
First, though the filmmaker cites Pitcairn's unique history as a factor, actually rape is an extraordinary problem in Melanesia and Polynesia generally. My chapter on Oceania in 
Romance on the Road describes the horrific situation in Papua New Guinea where both female and male tourists risk being raped in their travels.
RotR also describes warnings for women traveling in Polynesia to never wander on their own on an island, as this is taken as an invitation for sex.
The chapter on Oceania stresses the isolation of Oceanic societies, where local men who get involved with tourist women suffer great anxiety that they will be abandoned when the woman flies home to her country so far away.
Dea Birkett's book
Serpent in Paradise (thumbnail description here, scroll down) describes the incredibly circumscribed life on Pitcairn, such that she pays dearly for a one-night stand with an island Lothario -- and for not reciprocating the interest of a quieter, available islander.
I am wondering also if the producers of Trouble in Paradise: The Pitcairn Story looked at the issue of rape and incest in isolated societies. One of the most shocking aspects of my brief week in Barrow, Alaska, in 2004, filling in for the regular Arctic Sounder reporter, was writing up the police report. Dozens of pages described SAMs (sexual abuse of minors), a endemic problem in Native communities in rural Alaska. (I have also read a travel book -- An African in Greenland
-- set in part in the Inuit community suggesting problems there.)
The common thread here is that on an island such as Pitcairn, with fewer than 50 residents and 3,000 miles from anywhere, and in little Alaska villages not on any road, with illegal liquor flown in by bush plane and long winter nights, girls are at extraordinary risk of being raped by a predatory family member or neighbor.
I've read that astute mothers in remote places, from Alaska to Vanuatu, accompany their daughters everywhere (sometimes toting a rifle) until they reach marriage age.
I suppose it is expecting far too much for producers and journalists to attempt a quick perusal of sociological and anthropological literature when reporting on a topic.
However, the end result of sketchy reporting is that every expert reader of an article (or viewer of a documentary) scratches their head and concludes it is incomplete or lacks context. Plenty of people -- not just anthropologists, sociologists, and criminal justice experts, but also Peace Corps volunteers, backpackers and travel writers (and interim reporters like myself) -- stumble into the sexual cesspit of isolated societies and realize the sexual abuse of minors does not just affect Pitcairn and appears to be rife in much of the Pacific and Arctic ocean areas.
It is too bad more TV producers and reporters don't have access to Jstore, Academic Search Premier or any of the other databases college students can wallow in to find reams of citations to academic journals on any social sciences subject (see for example the databases available at Johns Hopkins University to anthropology or sociology students). Spend a day gathering citations and then wandering into the stacks (or online), and you will finally have a better idea of exactly how Pitcairn is just like Barrow or Papua New Guinea, and exactly how Pitcairn is unique unto itself.
To read more: The Parable of Pitcairn. Musings on the clash between Western jurisprudence and isolated societies.
- posted by jbelliveau at 8:49 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
