Pitcairn girls ‘like mayor’s private harem’

THE mayor of Pitcairn treated the young girls of the island like a personal harem, reserving for himself the right to sexually initiate them, a court on the island was told.

Steve Christian, 53, a descendant of the mutineer Fletcher Christian, was described as a dominating force in the isolated Pacific community who showed absolutely no remorse after raping two girls aged 11 and 12.

The victims, now adults, said they did not tell their parents because they would have been powerless to do anything on a speck of rock where co-operation between the few inhabitants, particularly the able-bodied men, was vital.

Their trauma was simply ignored until police began investigating sexual abuse on Pitcairn a quarter of a century later.

Christian, whose positions on the island range from supervising engineer to dentist, is accused of raping one young girl four times and a second twice, as well as indulging in consensual sex with two other under-aged girls.

In a statement to police read out in court, the second of the two alleged rape victims said: “Steve seemed to take it upon himself to initiate all of the girls on the island. It was like we were his harem.”

The court sat on Sunday as the Sabbath in Pitcairn, which is nine hours behind GMT, is observed on Saturday.

Christian is one of seven men on Pitcairn being tried separately for a range of alleged sexual offences dating back over 40 years. Three trials have begun, with three more due to start this week.

The seventh will be that of Christian’s son Randy, his heir apparent, who is accused of a series of rapes and indecent assaults.

Sources close to the case have described the charges as the “tip of the iceberg”, mere snapshots of a regime that has endured for decades on Pitcairn, Britain’s most remote, neglected and under-policed inhabited possession.

The alleged offences took place between the mid 1960s, when the population was about 80, and the early 1990s, when it had dropped to about 60.

There are now only 47 people on Pitcairn, a community founded by nine mutineers from the Bounty, their Polynesian consorts and six Polynesian men in 1790.