Pitcairn Island
Six men were convicted this week of a series of rapes on a tiny Pacific island populated by descendants of the perpetrators of the 1789 mutiny on the British ship the Bounty. Pitcairn’s mayor, Steve Christian, a direct descendant of mutiny leader Fletcher Christian, was among those convicted. The rocky island, still a British colony, has a permanent population of just 47, so lawyers and judges had to be brought in from New Zealand. Prosecutor Simon Moore said Pitcairn was a brutal society in which the men utterly dominated the women and raped girls as young as 7. During a five-year investigation, he said, police talked to every woman and girl who had lived on Pitcairn within the last 20 years. “We ended up with something like 30 women who said they had been sexually abused,” Moore said. Eight victims testified.
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