Nine avoid jail after gang rape of girl, 10

Nine people who pleaded guilty to raping a 10-year-old girl have avoided prison sentences – causing outrage in Australia today.

The case has prompted officials to launch a review of sexual assault cases in remote Aboriginal communities.

Prime minister Kevin Rudd said he was “horrified” by reports of the trial of a group of juveniles and young men charged with the rape of the child in the settlement of Aurukun in northern Queensland state in 2005.

District court judge Sarah Bradley placed six of the offenders, who were juveniles at the time of the rape, on 12-month probation and recorded no convictions against them.

She suspended six-month prison sentences for the three other offenders, aged 17, 18 and 26.

Judge Bradley told the offenders in her sentencing remarks that it was illegal to have sex with anyone younger than 16, but the victim in this case “was not forced and she probably agreed to have sex with all of you”.

Aboriginal leaders criticised the result as too lenient and demanded that Judge Bradley be fired.

Queensland attorney-general Kerry Shine said the government would appeal against the sentences.

State premier Anna Bligh announced a review of all sexual assault cases in Aboriginal communities on Cape York, the remote region where the assault occurred.

The case comes less than six months after the federal government announced a radical intervention to combat what an official report found was rampant child sex abuse in Aboriginal societies in the Outback Northern Territory.

The government moved to seize powers over the communities from the territorial government and impose restrictions on alcohol sales and distribution of pornography, among other measures.

While the report’s authors said the problem of child sex abuse was probably also present in remote Aboriginal communities in other areas, the plan applied only to the Northern Territory, where the federal government has constitutional powers it does not have over Australia’s six states.

Mr Rudd said: “I’m disgusted and appalled by the reports that I’ve seen … on this case. I am horrified by cases like this, involving sexual violence against women and children. My attitude is one of zero tolerance.”

Queensland Aboriginal activist Boni Robertson said there was no excuse for the rape, or the leniency of the sentences.

“There is nothing culturally, there is nothing morally, there is nothing socially and there is definitely nothing legally that would ever allow this sort of decision to be made,” she said.

Ms Bligh said she ordered the review of all sentences for sexual assault on the Cape York Peninsula in the past two years to ensure there was not a trend of leniency.

“The nature of the sentences in this case are so far from community expectations I have to say I am alarmed, and I am not prepared to just write this off as an unusual one-off case,” she said.