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    Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed
    Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed
    Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed
    Ebook444 pages6 hours

    Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed

    By Kathy Marks

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Pitcairn Island -- remote and wild in the South Pacific, a place of towering cliffs and lashing surf -- is home to descendants of Fletcher Christian and the Mutiny on the Bounty crew, who fled there with a group of Tahitian maidens after deposing their captain, William Bligh, and seizing his ship in 1789.

    Shrouded in myth, the island was idealized by outsiders, who considered it a tropical Shangri-La. But as the world was to discover two centuries after the mutiny, it was also a place of sinister secrets. In this riveting account, Kathy Marks tells the disturbing saga and asks profound questions about human behavior.

    In 2000, police descended on the British territory -- a lump of volcanic rock hundreds of miles from the nearest inhabited land -- to investigate an allegation of rape of a fifteen-year-old girl. They found themselves speaking to dozens of women and uncovering a trail of child abuse dating back at least three generations.

    Scarcely a Pitcairn man was untainted by the allegations, it seemed, and barely a girl growing up on the island, home to just forty-seven people, had escaped. Yet most islanders, including the victims' mothers, feigned ignorance or claimed it was South Pacific "culture" -- the Pitcairn "way of life."

    The ensuing trials would tear the close-knit, interrelated community apart, for every family contained an offender or a victim -- often both. The very future of the island, dependent on its men and their prowess in the longboats, appeared at risk. The islanders were resentful toward British authorities, whom they regarded as colonialists, and the newly arrived newspeople, who asked nettlesome questions and whose daily dispatches were closely scrutinized on the Internet.

    The court case commanded worldwide attention. And as a succession of men passed through Pitcairn's makeshift courtroom, disturbing questions surfaced. How had the abuse remained hidden so long? Was it inevitable in such a place? Was Pitcairn a real-life Lord of the Flies?

    One of only six journalists to cover the trials, Marks lived on Pitcairn for six weeks, with the accused men as her neighbors. She depicts, vividly, the attractions and everyday difficulties of living on a remote tropical island. Moreover, outside court, she had daily encounters with the islanders, not all of them civil, and observed firsthand how the tiny, claustrophobic community ticked: the gossip, the feuding, the claustrophobic intimacy -- and the power dynamics that had allowed the abuse to flourish.

    Marks followed the legal and human saga through to its recent conclusion. She uncovers a society gone badly astray, leaving lives shattered and codes broken: a paradise truly lost.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFree Press
    Release dateFeb 3, 2009
    ISBN9781416597841
    Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed
    Author

    Kathy Marks

    Kathy Marks is the Asia Pacific correspondent for the Independent newspaper. Since 1999 she has been based in Sydney, reporting on major stories from the region, including the political situation in East Timor, the 2002 Bali bombing and the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004.

    Read more from Kathy Marks

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    Reviews for Lost Paradise

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      This was such an interesting book...I am fascinated with Pitcairn Island...would be interesting to stay there for a short time.The book was about the rape cases on the island...older men, young girls. The case was mentioned in a Vanity Fair Magazine article
    • 3/5
      I was watching a documentary the other day that contrasted the male-dominated chimps with the matriarchal bonobos and I was struck by just how chimp-like Pitcairn society was.

      The physically-strongest men dominate every single thing on the island. Male bonding is very tight. There is universal acknowledgement of the self-appointed leader (often very grudgingly given) and there seems to be an agreement not to express violence towards each other which stops the society from becoming murderous and allows the males to do exactly as they please.

      As with chimps, all the females rank below the lowest male. They cannot physically do the male tasks of running the longboats in treacherous seas out to the passing ships to obtain food, mail and all manufactured goods and on- and offload people and this is what life on Pitcairn depends on. This lack of ability to provide for themselves gives the women no choice but to accept their lowly status and all the problems that having no personal power brings including almost ubiquitous domestic violence and sexual attacks. But, knowing nothing else, and there being no possibility of effective protest anyway, this way of life is accepted not just as perfectly normal but has the defence of being their traditional and cultural way of life at least in the eyes of the men.

      This book is concerned with the culture of accepted incest, paedophilia, molestation and rape of girls as young as 3, but generally from age 9 from which the mothers, often victims in their own time, are powerless to either prevent or stop for fear that they and their family be ostracised and on an island of less than 50 people, that matters.

      The investigation and subsequent trials took 7 years and many millions of pounds. A whole legal apparatus had to be set up on the island. Against that, there were online campaigns to stop the men being convicted saying everything from the girls tempted the men, that they were sexually advanced for their years, that it was island culture and nothing wrong with it to the fact that if the men were imprisoned the island would die as there would be no one to run the longboats and heavy physical work. People all over the world who are generally disgusted with paedophilia and rape felt that an exception should be made for these men, 'romantic' descendants of Fletcher Christian, chief mutineer on the Bounty.

      Alongside this the women who had been encouraged to finally report the sexual attacks on them when they were children faced enormous and often exceedingly nasty and spiteful pressure from their families to refuse to give evidence and to drop their charges and most did. Those that didn't, that bravely gave evidence and saw their attackers convicted now have to live with the fact that after all no one really cared about them, not the British who had been shamed into paying attention to this deserted colonial outpost, not their families, some of whom would never speak to them again, not the media who saw them as bringing low the Utopian paradise of a tiny, isolated tropical island, not any one at all.

      If they had cared, the men, some charged with multiple gang rapes of prepubescent girls, wouldn't have been given community service, imprisonment within the home or a couple of years behind "bars" only being let out 3 or 4 times a week and to be able to have family parties behind the fence (which passes for prison security) once a week.

      The book made me sick. The author did a good job of exposing why everyone should be moved off the island, dispersed into other communities and their wicked, brutish idea of civilization allowed to pass into history with the certainty of no more child abuse. But no, in this day and age of PC concerns, millions upon millions are being spent on this island to bring it up into the 21st century, although it wasn't poor before. But its still being run by the convicted rapists, the women still have no power and I am not convinced that there is any way young girls can be protected in Pitcairn.

      Rewritten and expanded May 26th, 2011
    • 5/5
      an intellegent observation of historical events and the ensuing catastrophy brought forward to the twenty first century.in a nut shell, captain bligh sails into the south pacific when his crew of mutineers overtake his ship then subsequently send him packing back to england. the mutineers refuse to return, eventually sailing around paradise until they land on the rock now known as pitcairn with some of the natives and their women.murder, rape and terror ensues, as the bountymen serial criminals at best, kill all the natives, then share the woman amongst themselves. being the isolated island that it is, no law, no infusion of indigenous pacific culture, and with no other intellegent additions to the community, the island lapses into a cult of spousal abuse, serial rape and serial pedofilia.eventually english law comes to the rescue as a few brave individuals risk friendship and familial relationship, privacy, and embarrassment when they bring horrific story's to the public. the culprits receive litte jail time as the sentensing handed down would have been considered laughable had it been anywhere else.a dynamic look into current south pacific history.
    • 3/5
      Interesting to read about the underbelly of an Island in the South Pacific that has been the subject of such romanticized notions. I did not care for the writing style which simply related the facts and did not seem to delve into the history of the Island and why it evolved into a pedophiles dream. There are tantilizing tidbits of information mentioned but not follow up - such as the illegitimate birth rate was high. How high? What dates? Who was involved? I also found it hard to keep track of who was who. Too many names with not much depth.
    • 5/5
      A detailed, horrifying and compulsively readable expose of the legacy of sexual abuse hiding behind Pitcairn Island's mystique. The author was one of the six reporters who was allowed to stay on the island and cover the rape trials of some of the society's most prominent men. The investigations barely scratched the surface; just about every girl who grew up on Pitcairn for the past several decades, perhaps going back into the nineteenth century, was raped by one or more men or boys. The author does a good job explaining the uniqueness of Pitcairn society and how it allowed sex abuse to flourish almost openly for so long without any of the islands taking steps to stop it. HIGHLY recommended.

    Book preview

    Lost Paradise - Kathy Marks

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