Pitcairn Island, one of the remotest communities in the world, is embroiled in another controversy involving underage sexual activity after its former mayor was found guilty of possessing more than 1, images and videos depicting child abuse — the eighth man out of a total male population of around 12 to be accused of sex crimes involving children. Michael Warren, who served as mayor of the tiny South Pacific island from to , could become the only inmate in the island's prison, after being handed a month sentence by a court in New Zealand for charges stemming back as far as That year, the island — which has a total population of around 50 — made international headlines after seven of its 12 men were accused of 55 sex crimes against underage girls as young as seven. Six were found guilty of crimes which stretched back more than 20 years. Warren was working in child protection on the island throughout the period he was downloading the images, and traveling in an official capacity to both New Zealand and the United Kingdom for training in the field, reported the Guardian. The images were reportedly found in Warren's possession in May , after he accidentally sent an email to a diplomatic staff member from an address in someone else's name. That address was found to be linked to an online chat site containing explicit images. Because of the remoteness of the island, which sits roughly halfway between New Zealand and Chile, and a series of legal challenges that saw Warren successfully resist facing justice in New Zealand, he was not formally charged until last month. Warren initially defended his possession of the images by saying he was trying to better understand child pornography in the wake of the convictions, according to Radio New Zealand. His lawyer Tony Ellis subsequently argued the images found in Warren's possession were "comparatively moderate" when compared to other cases and taken in the context of an island community with limited adults where most of the women were in relationships, according to Radio New Zealand.
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T he venerable Privy Council sits behind the usual barricades of modern life on prime London real estate at No. Now it sits as the court of last resort only to the splinters of an empire undone: British Gibraltar and a lingering handful of island territories in far-off seas. On a day in the hot London summer of , the smallest of all those colonial shavings, Pitcairn Island, took center stage for the first and surely the last time with a child-rape case that seemed to hover somewhere between Paradise Lost and Lord of the Flies. But it also carried with it—or the case never would have reached this archaic pinnacle—a subplot of a powerful government stumbling out of centuries of neglect. Photographs by Barry Salzman. Pitcairn is the last holding of the British Empire in the Pacific, a place and people so remote, so unlikely, and, until recently, so lost in time that they often seemed more myth than reality. But the place is real all right. The open sea has pounded at it for millennia, creating a fortress of foot cliffs fringed with just enough vegetation—banyan, coconut, breadfruit—to support a small population.
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Eighteen years have passed since the arrival of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island. The last of these mutineers has just died and the island is now populated solely by their widows and Read all Eighteen years have passed since the arrival of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island. The last of these mutineers has just died and the island is now populated solely by their widows and children including Thursday October Christian, son of Fletcher Christian. Onto this island Onto this island now comes a band of shipwrecked sailors, bringing with them a lust for women and a greed Read all.
Skip navigation! Story from Photography. In I spent an arduous three months working on a photography project about Pitcairn, a tiny island measuring just two by one miles, halfway between New Zealand and Chile. There is one way on and off: by sea, aboard a quarterly supply vessel. As a child, I was an avid reader. One book that had a particularly lasting influence was the true story of the Mutiny on the Bounty , a rip-roaring high-seas adventure charting the ill-fated mission of HMS Bounty. After taking a group of mainly female Tahitian captives, the men went in search of Utopia, eventually heading for Pitcairn, an uninhabited and mischarted island where no one would find them. The Pitcairners of today are largely descendants of this motley crew. Six of these men still live on the island; one is the current mayor. In , I headed to Pitcairn for 96 nights, to try to disentangle fact from fiction.
