Falling in love with the abuser compounds, not excuses, their crime

This is why we have laws protecting girls from this confusing and damaging experience. In my view, it isn’t sexual abuse, it’s emotional and psychological abuse.

I don’t speak about this emotional attachment academically or from a moralistic point of view. It happened to me. I too “fell in love” with my abuser and hoped he would marry me (my grandmother sold me to a pedophile barrister when I was fourteen).

When the horrifying truth finally broke through my childish fantasy, that the barrister would never kiss me because he had no intention of having an emotional involvement with me, without the tools to process this, I became suicidal. When I was kicked out of the house, because the sex then had, for the barrister, become too troublesome, I went on to live out the self-image he had given me, that of a sex toy, throughout my teenagehood. That was followed by half a lifetime more of chronic low self-esteem, depression and suicide attempts.

And if we think what is happening on Pitcairn is an isolated case on an isolated island, think again.

Better still, get out a video called Shame, written by Michael Brindley, co-writer of MDA and Grass Roots. Brindley was inspired to write the movie, about years of serial rapes of young girls in a country town, after hearing about semi-organised pack rapes every Saturday night in a country town in Queensland in the 1970s. These incidents occurred during the same period as the Pitcairn Island offences.

“I remember the girls were branded as asking for it,” says Brindley. “When people went to the police nothing was done. Finally, when a complaint was made elsewhere, one of the boys was from a wealthy family and they flew up lawyers from Brisbane and got the boys off”. He says it was the culture of that town., just like in Pitcairn.

Times may have moved on in the past 30 years. Let’s hope in many places and in many ways. But only because, as a community, we opened our minds and were prepared to take onboard and believe the unthinkable.

But we’re still only half way there. Forward ho. The rest is equally confronting and requires not outrage, but more complex understanding.