Pitcairn life of 'beatings and abuse'

By KATHY MARKS


A former Pitcairner yesterday painted a picture of a wretched childhood in which she was frequently thrashed at home and sexually assaulted by several older men on the island.

The woman, now 38, broke down in tears after describing a household from which affection was wholly absent. She was treated as a servant by her parents, she said, and beaten with a jandal or broom made of coconut fronds if she disobeyed them.

One of her alleged abusers was Terry Young, who is among seven Pitcairn men on trial for assaulting young girls on the remote island romanticised by many outsiders as a South Pacific idyll.

Young, 45, faces one rape charge and seven counts of indecent assault, allegedly committed over nearly 20 years in the British dependency.

The woman told the Pitcairn Supreme Court by video-link from New Zealand that most of the incidents took place when she went to secluded spots to collect firewood, which was one of her chores.

Her first clear memories were of Young raping her from about the age of 12, she said, but the indecent assaults began when she was much younger. They took place every time she went to fetch firewood, which was almost weekly. He always took her off into bushes nearby.

She could not tell her mother that she did not wish to go, for fear of being beaten.

"She would still have made me go. What she said, I had to do. I had no choice but to go."

The woman said that from reading books, she learned that such abuse was wrong.

At first, she tried to object.

"He [Young] would ignore me or just carry on what he was doing.

"After a while I stopped saying no because there was no point. I just lay there and let him get it over and done with. The quicker he did it, the quicker I was able to go."

Afterwards, she said, Young always told her not to tell anyone.

The woman could not tell her mother about the abuse because she was ashamed. Nor could she tell her teacher, who was from New Zealand.

"It was too shameful to tell anyone, let alone someone who was not from Pitcairn," she said.

The alleged abuse by Young continued until she left the island at 15 to go to school in New Zealand.

Until she spoke to police investigating allegations of widespread abuse on Pitcairn, she had not told anyone, not even her husband.

As a child, her home life was miserable, the woman said.

"Affection in terms of hugging and saying 'I love you', there was never that. But then in our family, no affection was shown to anybody."

In the separate trial of Steve Christian, Pitcairn's mayor, the court yesterday heard from a string of islanders called as defence witnesses.

One of Christian's alleged victims had told the court that he went to her house the night his oldest son was born and tried to have sex with her.

But Royal Warren, 76, who assisted at the birth, testified that Christian had been present the whole time.

Mrs Warren admitted that Christian did leave the room to use the toilet, "but I know he never left the room to go and do anything harmful".

Another islander testified that she had warned one of the seven defendants, then in his 30s, to stay away from her 13-year-old daughter, with whom he was having an affair. She once caught him up a ladder trying to climb in through her daughter's window. After she shouted abuse at him, he fell into the shrubbery.