Gordon McLauchlan: Sex? Off with their heads!

COMMENT

If i was a cartoonist (note my spurning of the subjunctive in a manner that will make pedantic grammarians squirm, I hope), I would draw a picture of a huge, bewigged English barrister, blindfolded (this time not in the interests of impartiality but to enable him better to shut out any view of the carnage he's causing), pursed puritanical lips, nose tipped up in that upper-class English way, his gown shutting out the sun he's not used to and his polished shoes patting Pitcairn Island down under the Pacific Ocean.

And, in the background, I would sketch the New Zealand Prime Minister uncharacteristically touching her colonial forelock.

The caption - quoting Jose Garcia Oliver, from the time of the Spanish Civil War - would read: "Justice is so subtle a thing, to interpret it one has only need of a heart." To which Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu would possibly want to add: "But some common sense and statesmanship don't go amiss."

Mandela and Tutu asked at a crucial moment in South Africa's history whether the purpose of justice was to serve a community or, in its unheeding way, to destroy it which retributive justice would certainly have done had they pursued it. Instead they saved their country with the sort of courage and humanity that shamed their erstwhile white masters.

Oscar Wilde, in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, put it another way, referring to a hanging:

For Man's grim justice goes its way,

And will not swerve aside:

It slays the weak, it slays the strong,

It has a deadly stride.

BECAUSE of the social devastation the trials on Pitcairn Island are certain to leave behind them, the opportunity was there to deal with the charges through truth and reconciliation or restorative justice. According to an American academic, Herbert Ford, a proposal for restorative justice was rejected by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and he quotes one official as adding, "even if that results in the dislocation of the community".

Ford wrote: "As late as the year 2000 there was ambiguity, and seemingly a lack of consensus even among New Zealand-based Pitcairn governing personnel, as to what age constituted the age of consent for sexual relations on Pitcairn Island."

He also said: "It is hard not to believe that a destructive vindictiveness toward the Pitcairn people ... is present here. What other motive is possible given the almost certain death-to-Pitcairn consequences ... ?"

To a buttoned-up public servant on a bleak winter's afternoon in London - the heart of a country that had an empire wrenched from its grip and pretends it gave it away - a tropical Pacific island must have seemed an ideal place to enforce the conventions they have themselves for centuries honoured more in the breach and out of their breeches.

It might also have the effect of distracting the mass of Britons from page 3 of their totally awful newspapers to the business of the sexual mores of Pitcairn which will titillate them at the same time as it makes them feel socially responsible.

And of course, even if they had a vote, and therefore any say in the laws that now bind them, Pitcairners number fewer than 50 so haughty bureaucrats can ride roughshod over them and enjoy a perverted sense of moral superiority.

Although when you think back, I suppose these Polynesians had their chance. I'm sure James Cook and the commanders of the thousands of ships that followed him in the 18th and 19th centuries would have said to the scum of Britain who manned them: "Okay chaps, now sex must be between consenting adults and you must make sure the girls are all over 16; and the fact that you have brought them the gift of venereal disease is no excuse to keep spreading it so lavishly. So all you chaps who are infected please stay aboard."

Ford, who directs the Pitcairn Islands Study Centre in San Francisco, has also suggested that some of the preparation for the trial was improperly and prejudicially handled. For example, Pitcairn Chief Justice Blackie held a series of meetings with FCO leadership in London four years ago about which a legal counsel warned: "This seems, on the face of it, open to misconstruction and not entirely in keeping with usual practice."

Do I sound angry? I hope so, and the main reason is not so much the actions of the Brits. Their aloof colonial ineptitude is legendary. What exasperates me is that the New Zealand Government has gone along with it, made it possible, done the dubious work for them.

HOW did this happen? Didn't someone in Cabinet say, "Hang on, guys, there's got to be a better way of doing this. Why destroy one of the most remote communities in the world when we could perhaps do some healing here, support any people who feel they've been misused, and take steps to make sure women are not being preyed on, even if it is part of the longstanding mores of this society. We know more about these people than the British who see only a dot on the map".

The main problem is the Judaeo-Christian tradition which invests in sexual aberration or deviance a kind of irredeemable quality from which victims can be restored, not by compassion and restorative procedures, but only by revenge.

If Pitcairn children had suffered thrashings, savage taunts, theft of their property or gross deprivation, no nonsense show trial would have eventuated. But sex? Off with their heads!

* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland journalist and author.