Martin Henry PITCAIRN ISLAND is exactly the size of a full stop (not period) on the map somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean. The island has a grand total of 47 permanent residents. But it is now in the international news big time. There are some interesting connections and similarities between the island of Pitcairn and the island of Jamaica.
Captain Bligh of the British naval ship The Bounty who brought ackee, breadfruit and lots of other stuff here is the same Captain Bligh against whom his sailors mutinied in 1789 when the ship was laden with breadfruit plants for the West Indies. The mutineers hid away on Pitcairn, a previously uninhabited island, to escape the hanging which would have been their lot had they been caught. They took with them six Tahitian men and a dozen women from another island. Violence got pretty bad among the mutineers, like in Jamaica today, and within a decade eight of the nine mutineers had been murdered one by one. The sole surviving man had the task which many a Jamaican man would find enviable of keeping the population going.
TASTE FOR YOUNG GIRLS
Another link is the male taste for young girls. That is why Pitcairn is making international news. The British Government has placed half of the adult male population, seven men, on trial for a range of sex offences spanning 40 years. The island's mayor is among those convicted.
Any number of cultures, past and present, have used puberty as a biological marker of a young woman's readiness for sexual initiation. What interests me in the Pitcairn saga is the attitude of the British Government and the moral foundation for such an attitude.
This is the same Britain which is bending over forward to accommodate homosexuality as a legal and legitimate sexual lifestyle. The mantra is that consenting adults are free to choose their sexual lifestyle. How does one determine an age of consent? We have, in Jamaica, moved that age for girls from 14 to 16. What differentiates a girl of 16 from a girl of 14 for sexual readiness physically and for decision-making psychologically, especially considering that the average age of puberty has come crashing down from mid-teens to pre-teens?
While a girl can agree to have sex at 16, she cannot attend the state universities or drive a car before she is 17. And she cannot help to decide who should govern the country by casting a vote before she is 18. The British legal system exported to much of the rest of the world in the colonial enterprise has strong moral foundations in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. There is hardly anything more strongly condemned in those scriptures than homosexuality. But not a word about an age of consent. Indeed, the central story of Christianity begins with the conception of the Messiah in an engaged teenage girl.
Now, people are free to abandon this prescription, but what will replace it, and with what consequences for entire societies? Law without moral foundations can only be arbitrary and unprincipled, merely the decree of the, at the moment, powerful. And moral foundations are fundamentally derived from religion. How does one go about legitimising homosexuality in a culture which has for millennia condemned it, while at the same time criminalising so-called underage heterosexual sex with consent in another culture where it is the tradition?
The doctrine of human rights, ad infinitum, is well established. Law by its very nature limits freedoms. But on what basis, then, should persons below some arbitrarily selected age be denied their rights to engage in sexual activity? Why should sex with animals continue to be ruled out by the law? Does this not constitute a serious infringement of rights? The Pitcairn convictions raise serious issues bigger than the place. Britain may have the power of the colonial master to impose its will on a society of 47 persons thousands of miles away from the seat of power, but it seems to lack all moral authority to do so.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
