Editorial - Tuesday November 12, 2013

Peter Jackson, editor, The Northland Age

MOST people succumb to brain fade from time to time. They do something uncharacteristically silly, in most cases without major repercussions. It can have extreme consequences in some occupations though, and the police force is one of those.

Last week the thin blue line dug a deep blue hole over the alleged stupefaction and raping of young girls by males not a lot older than them, but old enough to know what they were doing was very wrong, morally and legally. The initial police response was that they had been monitoring the perpetrators for two years. They had even spoken to them and warned them that what they were doing was verging on criminal, but could not lay charges until a victim complained.

If whoever came up with that hoped it would cut the story off at the knees they were badly mistaken. Within 48 hours it transpired that a 13-year-old girl had indeed laid a formal complaint, in 2011. So the story changed. Police Commissioner Peter Marshall duly conceded that perhaps four complaints had been received, but the evidence available was not strong enough to support charges. Not entirely convincing. Nor was Mr Marshall's attempt to explain the difference between a formal complaint and what police presumably regard as the common or garden variety. Anything that he or anyone else says now, short of an abject admission of failure, in an attempt to ameliorate the situation will only make the hole deeper.

At the time of writing the story seems to be that at least one officer did not apprise his or her superiors of the facts. If that is true it raises another question. If the officer who took the complaint in 2011 genuinely believed it was not strong enough to support charges, why didn't they say that last week?

To say that no complaint had been received suggests that an effort was being made to hide that fact, and if that is so, we are entitled to suspect that there was more to the failure to charge anyone than is now being acknowledged.

Unchallenged reports that one of the perpetrators is the son of a police officer may be even more problematic. It should not be taken as a given that police officers shield their children from the consequences of their behaviour, but it is not difficult to draw that conclusion here, and many have. It might reasonably have been asked whether the police would have failed to charge anyone, and say no complaint had been received, had the child of the officer been a 13-year-old female victim rather than an 18-year-old male perpetrator. And would the response have been different if the perpetrators were school teachers?

To be fair to the police, putting someone in the dock is not always as easy as the layman imagines. However clear the perception of criminality might be, they still need evidence, and are understandably reluctant to charge people without it. Having said that, over recent years they have shown an undisguised enthusiasm for putting everyone who is drawing breath in front of a judge and letting the court sort them out.

That they did not do so in this case, when we are told they had at least one formal complaint, perhaps four, when at least one of the alleged offenders was identified by the complainant, and when that person and/or others bragged of their exploits on the internet, is beyond comprehension for many people.

It also passes the understanding of most that what some of these boys have boasted about on Facebook has been interpreted by police as "verging on criminal". That quandary seems to hinge on the possibility that the sexual activity was consensual, which is irrelevant. Do we still have an age of consent in this country? Do we still have laws against unlawful carnal knowledge? If consent is an issue here, why is it not an issue for the likes of James Parker? (Parker's lawyer tried to make consent an issue, and was widely vilified).

If consent cannot be given by a 13-year-old, how could it possibly be said that the behaviour of these boys was verging on criminal? It was as criminal as it gets. Add what amounts to claims of stupefaction and we're talking about very long prison sentences. To warn offenders who publicly boast of effectively raping under-age girls who are too drunk to resist that what they are doing is verging on criminal is verging on the ridiculous.

There are probably only two explanations for the police response, one being that a very small number of officers got it very badly wrong, for reasons ranging from incompetence to corruption, the other that it is evidence of a police culture that everyone thought had been dealt with via Dame Margaret Bazley's damning 2007 report in the wake of alleged sexual offending by police members and associates. Hopefully it is the former, but whatever the scope of this particular infection it needs to be lanced, quickly and publicly.

Of broader concern is that the deviants who are behind all this are so bereft of any kind of morality that they not only used female children for sport, but saw no harm in boasting of it. They might have had a change of heart over recent days, but that's not likely. The one who has played the starring role has apparently disappeared, not, one imagines, as a show of remorse, but as a matter of self-preservation.

That's another unwelcome by-product of the public perception that the police aren't doing their job. People who don't have faith in the justice system are likely to do the job themselves, and it would not be unreasonable for these braggarts to have concerns for their safety. If they are charged, convicted and imprisoned they might have many years of living in fear to look forward to.

And it didn't take long for this story to start spinning off in other directions, some rational, others not. Some have been talking about the way we raise our children, our sons in particular, instilling in them the belief that they will always have their parents' protection, and failing to teach them the need for empathy and basic moral standards. Too many of our daughters, on the other hand, are allowed to flaunt themselves to the point where amoral males claim they are giving them what they deserve. Perhaps we are beginning to see the effects of relying upon pornography as the mainstay of sex education, as one commentator said last week, and a generation that has been instilled with huge self-esteem and very little else.

The outrage has certainly breathed new life into the sex education in schools brigade, some calling for formal lessons at new entrant level. They might be right, but they are talking about more than human biology. They want a graduated process that would have intermediate-age children learning about sexual orientation, experimentation and the body's ability to give pleasure. Hopefully schools that adopt that approach will be identified so sensible parents can shun them.

This sorry saga isn't about kids and sex though. It's about kids growing up in a moral vacuum, and destroying their lives and those of others. It might well be that some within the police have let us down badly, but they are the backstop.

The buck starts and stops with parents who allow their sons to grow into narcissists, for whom disgraceful behaviour such as this might just be the start.