A British police officer investigating allegations of child sex abuse on the tiny South Pacific colony of Pitcairn Island tried to extract information from an islander by getting him drunk, judges in New Zealand have been told.
The evidence was given during a special sitting in Auckland on Tuesday of the Pitcairn Supreme Court, which is hearing appeals by six islanders against their convictions last October for rape and other sexual offences against underage girls.
Constable Gail Cox of Kent police, who was sent to Pitcairn twice in the late 1990s to train locals in community policing, admitted the episode involving islander Dennis Christian was ”an unorthodox approach to policing” and ”totally unethical”, the New Zealand Press Association reported on Wednesday.
She wrote to Leon Salt, the Pitcairn Commissioner, in early 2000, telling him she had hoped to secure evidence from Christian to support claims of assaults on two local girls by fellow islanders.
Those complaints were reported to Cox during her second visit to the island in 1999 and led to widespread child abuse being uncovered.
Christian was one of the six men found guilty last year but at the time of the drinking session was not under suspicion.
Cox told the Auckland-based Salt she did not think he would approve of her methods.
”Had I obtained corroboration, I may have had quite a bit of explaining to do,” she said.
”In any case the approach was unsuccessful and I only ended up sporting a hangover which two paracetamol couldn’t shift.”
The six represent half the adult male population of the island community founded by the 1789 Bounty mutineers. Four of them were sentenced to prison sentences of between two and six years but remain free pending their appeals.
The six say the trials were an abuse of process because of the long gap since the offences, which occurred over a 30-year period, and the need to set up a special court to hear their cases.
Defence lawyers say Britain has not had legal jurisdiction over Pitcairn since the islanders’ ancestors burned the Bounty more than 200 years ago.
The defendants have also argued that even if Britain does have jurisdiction, it never promulgated laws against consensual underage sex on Pitcairn.
Peter George, one of the British detectives who investigated abuse claims, told the judges the situation would probably have come to light sooner if British police had been on the island earlier.
But he added: ”You don’t need a police presence to tell you that it’s against the law to rape a child.”
The court heard that Martin Williams, a former governor of Pitcairn, wrote to the British Foreign Office in 2001 noting that social workers and military police were being sent to the island ”to demonstrate that we are serious about the need for Pitcairn to move out of the 19th century”.
The hearing is continuing. – Sapa-AFP