Post #450527 by christiki295 on Wed, Apr 29, 2009 1:56 PM

This story just gets worse, and more bizarre: The rape of 11 year old girls; adultery on an island which only holds about 50 people; blaming the rape victims, even though the other women were rape victims themselves; the mayor Steven Christian denying he ever did anything wrong and, of course, brutal attacks against women by men who had done the very thing for which they were beating women.

This from Vanity Fair:

"Her parents had unhappy affairs with brutal results. Her father beat her mother senseless, then poured a bucket of water over her to revive her. “I can recall quite a few of the adults having affairs with different husbands, different wives,” she said. “I have seen some of the fights. All I’ve associated with sex on Pitcairn is violence.”"

"The trial of Steve Christian’s son Randy revealed the more perplexing aspects of the abuse on Pitcairn. His accuser testified to some of the most violent rapes, including one in which she was gagged and gang-raped by Randy, then 21, and his brother, Shawn, then 20. She was 11 at the time.

But her feelings for Randy grew conflicted. By age 14 she was infatuated. She wrote him in two love letters “that he made me feel special and that I really did like him,” she testified. Asked to explain her feelings toward a man who had assaulted her, she said, “I was confused. It was like he had two sides to him.… A great friendly guy and a person that did these awful things to me.”"

"Brian Young was tried last. He became the only defendant to testify, and opened a window into the roots of the abuse: how he had watched the schoolteacher having sex with a schoolgirl, how he and his chums had gotten their “sex education” watching one of their parents bed the parent of another.

Kari Young chose to testify, too, surely knowing her testimony would be humiliating and do Brian little good. But, like Fletcher Christian centuries earlier, she was in for the whole trip. There was no turning back now. In court, she conceded that she had supported the police at first, but changed her mind when she “started to doubt the ethics of the investigation.” She also delivered a line the reporters would have devoured had they been there to hear it: “I don’t know any married couple on Pitcairn who were faithful to each other.” "