Tapu Misa: Pitcairn culture shackled in a time-warp

COMMENT

I don't have much sympathy for those who get hoha about the use of Maori greetings by our newsreaders. I mean, really. It's been more than 20 years since a feisty Post Office operator by the name of Naida Glavish first dared to say "kia ora" to her callers and was officially censured and threatened with the loss of her job.

You'd think we'd have made some progress since then, but the revelation that TVNZ received half a dozen complaints a night when it first introduced "kia ora" into its bulletins five years ago, and still gets at least one a night, confirms that some of us are still suffering from a kind of cultural myopia.

The country has moved on, but still there are those who insist our national broadcasters should sound like the BBC, say "good evening" instead of "kia ora", denying the very things that distinguish us as a nation. My marketing friends would call this our brand, our point of difference, that which we like to drag out whenever we get important visitors, such as those high-flying overseas lawyers in town for a conference who pronounced themselves suitably fascinated and not at all bored by the welcoming powhiri.

Still, I'm constantly reminded that we don't all look at the world through the same cultural lens. Take, for example, the Pitcairn Island story, which has understandably riveted readers in Britain and here, given that it's about sex involving children and that it centres around a much-romanticised community, immortalised in books and movies.

Six men were this week found guilty of rape and assault, including one of a child as young as 7. But what interested me most was the extent to which culture was brought to bear as a defence for the sexual crimes.

Some of Pitcairn's women went so far as to hold a press conference to defend the island's tradition of under-age sex (at least by our standards), holding that Pitcairn has a unique cultural heritage in which consensual sex with 12-year-old girls is culturally acceptable on the basis that it was so back in Polynesian society of the 18th and 19th centuries.

It's true that the history books are full of accounts of Tahitian girls no older than 10 or 11 being offered up for the sexual gratification of visiting British sailors. But then the killing of babies at or before birth was also practised by Tahitian women of old, including those who sailed off into the sunset with Fletcher Christian and his motley crew of mutineers and no one is suggesting the continuation of those practices on cultural grounds.

I suppose it's possible to view the trial as some giant overreaction, as some have done, and the victims as either opportunistic or lacking backbone, prey to our so-called culture of victimhood.

It's certainly possible that some of the women who complained to the British authorities were infected by victimhood, but it's more likely that their contact with the outside world forced an adjustment of their cultural lens, and a discarding of the one they had grown up with in their time-warped, dysfunctional community.

I'm not sure why some victims are considered less deserving of sympathy. You're a victim whether you choose to pick yourself up and carry on, or lie wounded and waiting for help, or whether your wounds are psychological rather than physical. Maybe we're not too far evolved from societies that continue to blame the victims of sexual abuse for seeking justice and change.

I'm reminded of an Algerian-born French Muslim woman, Samira Bellil, who until her death last month personified the struggle of French Muslim women against not only the violence and gang rapes which flourish in the tough, immigrant suburbs of France (where 10 per cent of the population is Muslim) but also the conditions and culture of acceptance which allowed the abuses to continue unchallenged.

Bellil's best-selling book of 2002, Gang Rape Hell, told of how she had been raped by three men, and then shunned by her family and community when the rapes were made public.

It wasn't an uncommon experience. A month after her book was published, a 17-year-old Muslim girl was set on fire by a young man in the garbage shed of a Paris apartment complex.

When the perpetrator took police back to the scene of the crime to show how he had doused his victim with gasoline, the high-rise tenants broke out in cries of support.

That attitude came to the fore again when 18 Muslim youths were convicted for the rape of a 15-year-old girl. "You call this justice? Seven years in prison for some oral sex?" said the mother of one of the boys. "It's the girl who should be in jail."

I don't have much difficulty in seeing some of those convicted Pitcairners in the context of young men who were brought up to see sex with pubescent girls as normal.

But some of them clearly crossed a line, however blurred it had become, forcing sex on girls who didn't want it, weren't ready for it and were subsequently harmed by it, confident that they would never be censured or punished.

Well, they have been. I doubt whether any other course of action would have sent them as clear a message as the guilty verdicts handed down by the Pitcairn Supreme Court on Monday.

It's not so hard to see why the victims - freed of the cultural shackles and the myopia that afflict a tiny, isolated and, let's face it, incestuous community - would want to see an end to the hurt.

That seems to me like justice, not victimhood.

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