[BRIEF NOTE] More from Pitcairn

[rfmcdonald]

Jonathan Edelstein continues to provide excellent coverage of the Pitcairn Island sex-assault case, informing us that one of the seven defendants has plead guilty to three of the four charges, the fourth charge being dropped largely because of the unwillingness of the victim to let her case proceed.

The Head Heeb also links to a revealing article in the Independent by Kathy Marks, looking behind the façade presented of Pitcairn as a South Pacific paradise. Marks concludes that, after just three days of court testimony,

the image of Pitcairn as a South Pacific idyll has been brutally shattered. Alleged victims have painted a picture of widespread abuse in a world in which young girls were treated as no better than playthings.

A woman of 51, who was allegedly raped and abused by several defendants as a young girl, testified that Pitcairn men lived according to laws of their own making. "It just seemed to be the normal way of life back on Pitcairn, how the girls are treated, as though they are a sex thing," she said.

"Men could do what they want with them. They seem to be a rule unto themselves. That's the way it is on Pitcairn. You get abused, you get raped. They just do what they want with you and then leave you in the gutter. It's a normal way of life on Pitcairn."

The woman's own father, a pillar of the community, was a violent man who beat his wife senseless almost nightly. After one alleged rape at the hands of Steve Christian, her father thrashed her with a razor strop because the incident had made her late for church.

For her, growing up on Pitcairn was not the carefree existence that outsiders might have fondly imagined. The woman, now married and living overseas, said: "Everyone thinks Pitcairn is a paradise. But it's sheer hell."

On a futuristic note, as pompe observed, the situation on Pitcairn, where for apparently a long period of time the brutal sexual exploitation of women was taken as a given, doesn't reflect encouragingly upon isolated and independent space colonies established in a hypothetical future.