Charting the place of islands in criminology: On isolation,integration and insularity

Abstract

In this article, we seek to chart the place of islands in criminology with respect to both their place- and space-based attributes. We explore the possibilities of island criminology through the case of Pitcairn Island, which in 2004 formed the backdrop for a series of sensational sexual assault trials. The trials thrust the Island, its people, history and customs into the international spotlight, acting as a counter-narrative to the popular mythology of islands as idyllic paradises. This case study provides us with an opportunity to re-examine how fundamental concepts for understanding crime and regulation, such as social integration, community and belonging, and exclusion are practised in the often closed and bounded networks of island ecologies.

Keywords

community rural and remote social capital social ecology violence

Introduction

In 2002 Janelle Patton was murdered on the Australian territory Norfolk Island. Her body had 64 stab wounds, a fractured skull, broken pelvis and broken ankle. In 2006, Glenn Peter Charles McNeill, a 28-year-old New Zealander, was charged with her murder and in 2007 sentenced to 24 years in prison. The murder generated headlines in Australia and New Zealand, not least because Patton had been the first person murdered on Norfolk Island in 152 years. The murder also jarred with the idea of the Island as a secluded arcadia from which to escape social problems associated with mainland/urban life (e.g. Christian-Bailey, 2006; Clarke, 1966). Norfolk Island is indeed isolated, laying 877 miles east of the Australian Mainland. At the time of the 2016 Australian census, it had 1748 inhabitants living in an area of 38.7 km² (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016). The isolation that now makes it an ideal tourist destination had also historically rendered it a brutal site of transportation for convicts from mainland Australia who had transgressed during their sentence.¹

Media reports were attracted not only to the gruesome nature of the crime, but also made much of the perceived tight-knit nature of the community and the Island’s earlier violent history (Maynard, 2011). Many of those now living on Norfolk are descendants of Bounty mutineers who moved there in 1856 from Pitcairn Island (also in the Pacific Ocean) and are closely connected by kinship (Christian-Bailey, 2006). Now one or more among them might be a murderer. The situation was reminiscent of an Agatha Christie who-done-it, ripe for amateur sleuthing, and turned a spotlight away from the scenic beauty of the Island and onto its inhabitants. The murder had again transformed the territory into a site of grim consumption, the Island and islanders’ strangeness amplified amid the talk of murder.

From a criminological point of view, the reaction to the case was interesting to the extent that place was instrumental to the narratives constructed around the crime. The isolation of the Island became a signifier for backwardness, rather than beauty (e.g. Latham, 2006; Macklin, 2013). Further, social integration, often uncritically deemed a positive attribute in criminology when cast as social capital, was transformed in the popular consciousness into a criminogenic attribute which might produce violence. None of this would have been unfamiliar to rural or green criminologists, who have long been sensitive to discursive constructions of place (see Jewkes and Moran, 2015; McClanahan, 2019; Scott and Hogg, 2015; South, 2019). But what is surprising is that criminology is yet to examine islands as specific ecological settings, accounting for place (the social construction of crime in such settings) and space (the objective social and geographic conditions of islands and island life that have criminogenic impacts). The reasons for this neglect require careful consideration, the type that cannot be provided here, but an obvious factor is criminology’s obsession with urban crime. Perhaps less apparent has been the marginalization of islands in the global North as places on the geographic and cultural peripheries.² They are Other places, national backwaters or places to be colonized and, more recently, consumed as tourist sites.

Too often, criminological theories are developed through testing in one environment, typically urban. In this article, we seek to chart the place of islands in criminology with respect to both their place- and space-based attributes. Although they are situated in criminological backwaters, as Hay (2006: 19–20) observes, there are sound reasons to take an interest in islands. Ten per cent of the world’s population lives on islands and nearly a quarter of all sovereign states are islands. Islands have also taken a lead in the development of innovative forms of governance with regard to environmental management and the development of alternative technologies, and they have been fundamental to evolutionary science. Of course, island peoples and their practices have also informed the social sciences, especially with regard to anthropology, but also criminology, in terms of restorative justice.

What follows are the first tentative steps towards finding a place for islands in a criminology informed by ecology, which here refers to the relationship between people and the environment of a place. Drawing on insights into criminological practices in rural places, and the social construction of ‘islandness’, this article charts an ‘island criminology’ that takes care not to mythologize islands as places of either idyllization or horror. In doing so, we explicate how criminological approaches are steeped within particular traditions and places that often cannot account for the exigencies of spaces and places outside those constructions.

We explore the possibilities of island criminology through the case of Pitcairn Island, a much mythologized place whose earlier inhabitants also settled Norfolk Island in 1856. In 2004 Pitcairn Island formed the backdrop for a series of sensational sexual assault trials. The trials thrust the Island, its people, history and customs into the international spotlight, acting as a counter-narrative to the popular mythology of islands as idyllic paradises. This case study provides us with an opportunity to re-examine how fundamental concepts for understanding crime and regulation, such as social integration, community and belonging, as well as exclusion and othering, are practised in the often closed and bounded networks of island ecologies.

Place, space, crime and the northern gaze

Both ‘place’ (the social construction of crime in space) and ‘space’ (the objective social and geographic conditions that have criminogenic impacts) are important in criminology. Nevertheless, space has been a primary focus of criminologists. Early criminology used terms such as urban sociology and ecology of crime for the study of crime and space, both areas pioneered by the Chicago School of Sociology. This approach has remained current in strain approaches to criminology, especially research focusing on neighbourhood and city crime. Crime prevention literature has more recently directed attention towards the ownership and monitoring of public space, especially with regard to situational crime prevention and crime prevention through environmental design (Carrabine et al., 2014). Criminologists also regularly use mapping to show the spatial dimensions of crime.

In contrast, place has mostly been an afterthought in criminology, examined occasionally with reference to fear of crime (see Girling et al., 2000) or in cultural criminology focusing on urbanity (see Hayward, 2004) or rurality (see Scott and Hogg, 2015). However, as Murray (2017: 32) argues, humans are ‘placelings’ in that all action and thought is located in place. Place sculpts the identity of peoples (e.g. mountain people, coastal peoples, polar peoples, forest peoples, jungle peoples, etc.) (Hay, 2006: 22) and, similarly, places are also dependent on people for their identity (Memmott et al., 2006: 41).

Although place is a foundational concept in geography, it was not until the 1970s that a phenomenology of space in geography emerged with an emphasis on place as ‘space with meaning’. Phenomenology would argue that our personal and social experiences are embodied and are inclusive of the way in which we experience places (Murray, 2017: 32–35). As such, it is not just the objective or physical characteristics of space that are important; place can also be a location or repository of meaning, imbued by individuals, groups and socio-cultural processes (Kolodziejski, 2014: 29–30; Low and Altman, 1992; Tuan, 1979).

Perceptions of places, including fear of crime, can be both evocative and highly criminogenic. For example, there have long been ‘bad neighbourhoods’, slums, ghettos, shanty towns and crime hot spots. In popular culture, London’s East End has a strong association with the ‘Ripper’ murders and New York City’s Central Park, muggings. Such associations can be hard to dislodge. There are also placeless locations or ‘non-places’, such as airports, which get stripped of character and are virtually indistinguishable from one another, being almost devoid of meaning (Kolodziejski, 2014: 29).

People can have a conceptual attachment to place or a space-specific attachment (Kolodziejski, 2014: 29–30) and have a strong sense of place, either positive or negative. This perception may depend on the degree to which they have agency in regards to their location. For instance, some people are born and bred in places and others choose to relocate (Kolodziejski, 2014: 43–44). Place attachment can also be informed by emotion, cognition, practice, action, social relations and temporal aspects (Low and Altman, 1992). Place attachment has been linked to pro-environmental behaviours (Scannell and Gilford, 2010), just as it could be linked to crime prevention. Place attachment might also be considered one element, albeit an important one, which informs belonging—a concept used in sociology and political-ecology in relation to in-groups and out-groups and one that is often closely associated with longevity in place. There is also a link here to the associated concepts of social capital and collective efficacy (see Wikström and Sampson, 2003). Collective efficacy implies that communities with high levels of integration and trust can intervene to stop crime from escalating. The gemeinschaft and gessellschaft dichotomy (see Tönnies, 1963 [1887]) suggests that rural places typically embody such qualities. This work has also been linked to social networks, which exist in space.

Imagining the place and space of islands

It is difficult to define what constitutes an ‘island’. In terms of their spatial characteristics, islands are relatively confined terrestrial systems, bounded by sea. Biologists define ‘small’, isolated bodies surrounded by water as islands, but ‘small’ is an imprecise term (Jedrusik, 2011: 202). For instance, Papua New Guinea, Borneo and Madagascar are all technically islands, but are also large land masses (>500,000 km²). Jedrusik (2011: 202) defines islands as being smaller than 10,000 km² and a continent in excess of 50,000 km². By this definition, there are several hundreds of thousands of islands worldwide with only 18 having a surface area greater than 10,000 km². Isolation and remoteness are also important considerations (Jedrusik, 2011: 202). In many European languages the word island resembles terms for isolation, but isolation here has as much to do with geographic distance, as it does with the place-based nature of the communities and cultures living within island geographies. It is also the case that both geographic and cultural isolation may be challenged in periods of rapid globalization.

Similar definitional concerns have troubled rural criminology, despite demographers having developed very concise definitions of the rural specific to national contexts. Our preference here is to think of islands in terms of place and space. This enables us to look beyond objective geographic markers to consider other contextual factors, including how identity is socially constructed within these settings and how this might also link to constructions of deviance and crime.

Here, we view islands as typically being non-urban and peripheral or isolated settings. Their borders are often ‘natural’, as opposed to being socially generated through politics or struggle (Hay, 2006: 21–22). Nevertheless, the shoreline is a signifier of both physical and social inclusion and exclusion; the ‘edge’ is said to refer to the sense of physical boundedness of islands and may be more apparent the smaller the island. In her classic study of pollution, anthropologist Mary Douglas (1992) observed that danger existed on the boundaries or margins of places, in areas poorly defined or in transition. Islands may convey a sense of security to the extent that their borders are sharply defined and visible. Islands are also often deeply imbued with meaning, which may or may not influence peoples’ ability to integrate into and/or create an attachment to island spaces. For instance, it has been argued that wilderness and rural landscapes engender a greater sense of attachment (Kaltenborn and Bjerke, 2002) and, in turn, attachment to and ‘ownership’ of space has been associated in various theories of crime (e.g. broken windows, strain and routine activities theories).

The distinct attributes of islands give presence to what has been termed ‘islandness’. Conkling (2007: 192) cites qualities of islandness as independence, loyalty, a strong sense of honour, handiness, earthy common sense, fragility, opinionated machismo, tolerance of eccentricity, fragile discretion, highly individualized expressions of spirituality and superstition, a complex oral tradition and canny literacy and intelligence. While such attributes may be one expression of islandness, we argue here that islandness is variously articulated and, as shown below, may be associated with negative attributes. Indeed, islandness can be expressed in symbolic and practical ways and informs what we refer to here as the politics of belonging in island and non-island places. Islandness is often felt instinctively by those local to islands, but is articulated by outsiders to islands (Conkling, 2007: 192). Selwyn (1980) argues that many of the characteristics of islands are not dissimilar to those of small countries, and culturally homogenous rural places are also perceived to share such qualities. Conkling (2007) aligns islandness with many characteristics that are associated with ideal gemeinschaft settings. Indeed, these may be considered as mostly positive attributes and present islands as places of social capital, but there is potentially also a darker side to island experience.

Islands as metaphor

Islands are a central metaphor in western discourse. Again, not unlike rural places, discursive constructions of islands in popular culture veer between two poles, providing for diverse and contradictory meanings and narratives. The isolation and remoteness of some islands is especially evocative of what might be termed ‘island-idylls’ and ‘island-horrors’. Both tropes are important to the criminological narrative as both speak to idealized articulations of human nature and social order. Each became prominent with western imperial expansion. Indeed, islands were prominent at the very beginnings of western colonization and imperialism and remain today as the last vestiges and dormant reminders of Empires. Within these contexts, these analogies have been primarily (though not exclusively) constructed from the ‘outside, in’ by those observing and imagining island life, rather than by island locals themselves. In this manner, notions of ‘idyll’ and ‘horror’ are both relative to the social norms of those constructing and controlling these discourses and thus, we see ‘horror’ most often defined in terms of a departure from the imagined ‘good life’ in western society, including subversion of western notions of deviance and crime.

The island-idyll is a symbolic place into which various meanings of islandness are condensed. Idyllization is produced by mainlanders, as well as by islanders themselves, and sources nostalgic yearnings for an imagined community remembered as purer, simpler, natural and stable. It can provide an escape from city and/or mainland life and the problems considered to manifest it, leading to a sense of belonging. In the idyll, the island presents as a space of bucolic tranquillity and communion with nature—an authentic place of retreat from the mainland (Bell, 2006: 152).

In this respect, ‘idyllization’ involves processes which produce stylized representations of islands, while simultaneously rendering certain aspects of islandness marginalized or invisible. For example, such processes might combine nature, romanticism, authenticity and nostalgia to create a sense of ‘tropical paradise’, the contents of which vary geographically and historically. Island-idyllizations often fail to account for the fact that small, close-knit island communities, which are havens for the mainland consumer or tourist, were often created violently at the expense of other cultures and other uses of the land. This other history of island spaces is marginalized within the island-idyll. Here, historical transitions and processes are smoothed over and masked. As such, the idyll is symbolically and materially an exclusive and exclusionary space—those excluded are the ‘abject’ or Others. As such, idyllization tends to obscure aspects of difference and division in island spaces.

Idyllization of islands has a long history. The 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe (De Foe, 2010 [1719]), drew on Shakespeare’s Tempest (1994 [1611]) and was so successful that it created a genre of fiction sometimes referred to as a ‘Robinsonade’ or ‘desert island story’. Unlike The Tempest, this novel and those that followed and imitated it presented a colonial undercurrent, with the island being an inhospitable place from which progress could be achieved through rationality and technology (see also Swift, 2012 [1726] Gulliver’s Travels). The genre can more recently be found in science fiction dealing with isolated planets (see Lost in Space, 1965–1968), while its highpoint was perhaps RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (2013 [1858]), which was immensely popular and considered a classic for English-speaking school children for much of the 20th century (other popular versions include The Blue Lagoon (Stacpoole, 2013 [1908]) and Cast Away, 2000). Many of these depictions of the island-idyll drew on Imperial exploration in the Pacific and fuelled images of latter-day gardens of Eden and ideas of Pacific culture as an exotic Other (Amoamo, 2011: 2–3). The European romanticization of the South Seas began with Bougainville’s arrival in Tahiti in 1768. This mythologization persisted into the 20th century and even the Pacific War could be packaged as playing out in a paradise (see South Pacific, 1958). A large aspect of idyllization is the way in which island life, especially in the South Pacific, has been sexualized. While literary fiction has been central to this sexualization, so too has academic research. Perhaps the most notorious of texts has been Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. First published in 1928, the book is a key text in nature–nurture debates, arguing the primacy of culture in psychosexual development.

The nightmarish side to this dream also included early accounts of cannibalism, sacrifice, infanticide and endemic warfare. Writers such as Stevenson and Melville played to both visions (Rigby, 1997: 68–69). Threats to the island idyll included progress itself, at least the kind of progress that was un-tempered and produced what Durkheim (2006 [1897]) would term anomic conditions. Islands could also be incubators of unnatural sexual practices and passions, which variously confirmed or contrasted with readings of Mead’s work. For example, Norfolk Island was intended to be the ‘ne plus ultra of punishment’ (Governor Brisbane), a ‘hell on earth’ and the most dreaded place in the British Empire. But such pitiless intentions gave way to its image among many observers as ‘Sodom Isle’ (Macklin, 2013). There was certainly a flatness to social structure of relatively smaller islands that levelled out distinctions drawn from status and class. The loosening grip of ‘civilization’ could be variously interpreted as positive or threatening and, as will be discussed later, with reference to Pitcairn Island, sexuality and sexual practices have been strong markers of place and space.

Of course, the beneficial qualities of islands were not lost on enlightenment penal reformers and isolation served to not only incapacitate criminals, it could also enhance rehabilitative functions. As Hogg and Brown (2018) have observed, transportation as a penal project has been largely forgotten today. While it was characteristically ‘southern’, it was also at times an island project and a global one (Hogg and Brown, 2018). What more were the rotting hulks on 19th-century Thames than man-made islands? What more was Australia than a series of islands ranging from New Holland to Tasmania and Norfolk? Bonaparte was exiled first to Elba and then to the remote St Helena. Islands have also been places of political punishment or exile, notably Robben Island in South Africa and Sakhalin Island in Russia and the Soviet Union. And while the British may have relegated transportation as a mostly 19th-century phenomenon, the story of Henri Charriere (Papillon, 1970), reminds us that islands continued to play a role in punishment, and the penal imagination, into the 20th century (see also Alcatraz, California; Palm Island, Queensland; and Rottnest Island, Western Australia). Not without irony, in the 21st century, Australia continues to utilize islands off its coast to hold asylum seekers. Finally, the penal history of places such as Alcatraz and Robben Island has recently been reimagined in terms of ‘dark tourism’, where death and distress can be consumed as a tourist experience of the distant and recent past (Strange and Kempa, 2003).

In this way, isolation and remoteness can also produce nightmares, with islands also presented as anti-social backwaters of conformity and antique tradition (Hay, 2006: 27). The horror of island life was no better presented than in William Golding’s dystopian Lord of the Flies (1960 [1954]). The book could be considered a parody of the The Coral Island, inverting the idea of evil as an external threat to the Island’s inhabitants and, instead, making it present in the children themselves. Islands have been havens for mad scientists (Wells, 2012 [1896] The Island of Dr Moreau) and Bond Villains (Fleming, 2005 [1957] Dr No), have served as a stage for detective stories including the work of Agatha Christie, have been tax havens for white collar criminals and have been the setting for popular police serials (Bergerac, 1981–1991; Death in Paradise, 2011+; Shetland, 2013+). One of the more chilling narratives, The Wicker Man (1973), centres on the visit of a police sergeant to an isolated British Island to investigate a missing persons case, only to discover that the inhabitants have reverted to paganism and are engaged in sacrificial murder. These narratives invert the idyll and, again referring to Douglas (1992), recreate islands as uncanny spaces where the prison in paradise presents as ‘matter out of place’. It may be, as with The Wicker Man, an outsider intrudes into a space where they do not belong, or civilization or law intrudes on the island idyll. Entering such a space produces what Freud described as the uncanny, in which the Heimlich becomes unheimlich (Kristeva, 1982).

While the island-idyll creates island space as an object of desire because it is not urban or mainland, island space may also be presented as an object of dread for the same reason. There exists in cultural texts a less than Arcadian island (Bell, 1997: 94). In this context, the island might represent aspects of incivility that are threatening because they are wild or ‘primitive’, at least from the perspective of the non-island outsider’s gaze. Thus, the island can also be unsettling because it exposes the fragility of civilization (Bell, 2006: 152). With the dystopian island, what was normatively valued in the idyll becomes a source of the abject (Kristeva, 1982). For example, the dense social networks and organic solidarity that characterize island communities may also produce and support violence.

Mainstream texts draw on cultural resonances of the idyll, but also contest it; traits which are legitimated in the idyll are instead presented as excessive. Inbreeding, insularity, backwardness and sexual perversion are here associated with islandness. Incest and degeneracy are transformed into symptoms of solidarity (Bell, 1997: 96). Elements of this informed the Patton murder narrative and, as will be shown below, were blatantly exploited in media surrounding the Pitcairn Island sexual assault trials.

Anti-idyll: Towards a critical criminology of islands

Islands have only recently appeared in criminology, though studies generally do not deeply consider the place and space characteristics of island settings. For example, Stallwitz (2012) situated their empirical study on heroin use in the Shetland Islands (off Scotland) within rural criminology, but did not take account of the potential uniqueness the islands might hold beyond their mere rurality. There has also been much written about crime and tourism, a large proportion of it focusing on islands, especially the Caribbean. Early accounts of tourism and crime argued that property offences, rather than violent offences, were more closely linked to tourism. Mass tourism has been closely aligned with increases in crime rates (mostly property) on islands (Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999) and the notion that tourists are more likely to be victims of such crime, rather than residents (Chesney-Lind and Lind, 1986). Two theories, both ecological, have dominated theorizing on island tourism and crime, these being routine activities theory and hot-spot theory (Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999). And while property crime has represented the anti-idyll, white collar crime has been rife on islands in terms of their roles as tax havens (see, for example, Bermuda).

Some well-publicized violent robberies in the Caribbean during the 1980s and 1990s shook the tourism industry and views of the tropical Atlantic islands as an ‘American Paradise’ in a similar way in which the 2002 Bali bombings disrupted Australian idyllizations of Bali. Moreover, during the early 1990s the United States Virgin Islands had the dubious distinction of having higher violent crime rates than New York City (Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999: 972). In the case of the US Virgin Islands, tourism officials hired a major public relations firm to improve the image of what the local police chief described as ‘our islands’ (Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999: 973). Tourism crime reminds us that islands are often highly racialized post-colonial settings. In tourist scenarios, the outsiders are victims of crime and a focus is crime prevention to improve the safety of the economically significant group (see Albuquerque and McElroy, 1999). In this research, the idyll is reproduced and we are reminded of Ballantyne’s Coral Island, with the safety of the outsiders taking precedence over socio-structural factors, such as the economic exploitation of islands and their inhabitants.

Some of this previous work has been critical and focused on the post-colonial experience (see Pratt and Melei, 2018). However, while aspects of islandness have been captured in recent work (see Scott and Morton, 2018; Staines and Scott, 2019), these studies also reinforce the idea of the island-idyll. Pratt and Melei (2018) for example, see Tuvalu as a place where customary punishments had until recently kept prison populations low, countering the dramatic growth of imprisonment in the global North. They see social cohesion and solidarity as key factors which have achieved this, but these conditions are being challenged by human rights discourses and practices, imports of cheap alcohol and climate change, all of which have undermined traditional social structures. While this work is valuable in the way it highlights shifts in forms of social control, it does not examine how integration is itself a product of social control.

There has also been an interest in the historical legacy of islands as places of incarceration, including as quarantine sites (see, for example, Pearn and Carter, 1995). Some of this work has explored islands as places of transportation and deportation, mapping the forgotten geographies of punishment in global North (Hogg and Brown, 2018). ‘Carceral geography’ is a recent sub-discipline of criminology, having emerged early this century and drawing on earlier work by Foucault on the development of disciplinary power and Goffman on total institutions (see Moran, 2016; Moran and Schliehe, 2017). Moran (2016: 2) has outlined three broadly related themes in the sub-discipline as ‘the nature of carceral spaces and experiences within them, the spatial geographies of carceral systems, and the relationship between the carceral and the increasingly punitive state’. As an example of the latter, Mountz (2011) examines islands as part of a broader enforcement archipelago of detention as a tactic of migration control. This work is part of a broader body that has argued that political struggles over human smuggling, asylum seekers and detention are played out on the margins of the nation state and beyond the prisons of the global North (see, for example, Boochani, 2018; Martin and Mitchelson, 2009). Armstrong and Jefferson (2017: 245) capture the way in which carceral geography has focused attention on the place-based aspects of incarceration:

Looking down on the islands and the expanse of water of the carceral archipelago, we wonder about the relationship between the parts and the whole, and the difficulty of distinguishing figure and ground. Are prisons Islands—discrete yet connected or might it be more fruitful to think of water itself as the constraining phenomena? Land or water as preferred metaphor for confinement? Fixed locations or fluid spaces of betweenness?

The extant literature rarely examines islands as unique ecological places or even provides an account of variations in crime on islands based on geographic dimensions such as size or demographics and social structures. Further, existing studies ignore the social construction of crime on islands, only examining its ‘real’ dimensions. In an era where post-colonial and southern criminologies have alerted attention to the forgotten places and spaces of criminology and the selectiveness of the northern gaze, it is timely to consider the place of islands in criminology. The rest of this article seeks to do this, drawing on the case of Pitcairn Island.

Pitcairn Island

The reader must remember that all these people are the descendants of half a dozen men; that the first children intermarried together and bore grandchildren to the mutineers; that these grandchildren intermarried; after them, great and great-great-grandchildren intermarried; so that to-day everybody is blood kin to everybody. Moreover, the relationships are wonderfully, even astoundingly, mixed up and complicated. A stranger, for instance, says to an islander: ‘You speak of that young woman as your cousin; a while ago you called her your aunt.’

‘Well, she is my aunt, and my cousin, too. And also my stepsister, my niece, my fourth cousin, my thirty-third cousin, my forty-second cousin, my great-aunt, my grandmother, my widowed sister-in-law—and next week she will be my wife.’

(Twain, 1879)

Islands have been a wonderful stage for political satire and Mark Twain was quick to see the potential of Pitcairn Island, which had become a mythological place a century after mutineers had founded it. Pitcairn Island is ideal for our purposes in the sense that its isolation and size, measured in geography and population, render it a stereotype of an island. Pitcairn has also been described as a ‘site of textual overload’ (Fletcher, 2008: 58), which situates it well in terms of place. In addition to Twain’s contribution, its story inspired a novel by Jules Verne and myriad Hollywood movies.

Situated in the South Pacific, Pitcairn is not much larger than NYC’s Central Park (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). It is Britain’s smallest colony (one mile long and two miles wide) and the last British territory in the Pacific. The nearest large nation is New Zealand, which is 3000 miles away. Media typically describe it as ‘the world’s most remote inhabited island’, ‘tiny rock’, ‘outcrop’ or ‘speck’ in the ‘middle of the Pacific’ (Fletcher, 2008: 60–61). The technology of the airplane, which has most challenged the concept of the island as fortress defended by the sea, does not apply to Pitcairn, because it is only accessible by the sea (Fletcher, 2008: 67). No airplane has ever landed on Pitcairn and no ship has ever moored there (Fletcher, 2008). Landing on the Island requires skilled boating by locals to take people from ships anchored 2-300 meters from the rocky and cliff-faced shores (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). The entire population of the Island (50 people) lives in one settlement, Adamstown. For 130 years the only method of communication with the outside world was a lantern waved at passing ships (Farran, 2007; Pochnau and Parker, 2007).

The recorded story of Pitcairn Island begins with the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789. Of 25 mutineers, 16 remained in Tahiti. The others sailed to the uncharted and uninhabited Pitcairn Island accompanied by 12 Tahitian women and six Polynesian men. The treatment of the Polynesian men on the Island and rivalry for the women soon led to infighting and murder. One of the mutineers, who had worked at a distillery in his youth and discovered the intoxicating qualities of a local plant, died an accidental death, the result of intoxication. Another died a natural death. The others were murdered and by 1808, when the Island was discovered by an American whaler, only one of the original adult men, a mutineer named John Adams, remained. However, the remaining Tahitian women and their children increased the Island’s population to 50 and it continued to grow steadily thereafter.

Adams had turned to Christianity and tales of the idyllic existence of the children of the mutineers became a staple in Victorian texts on virtue (Shapiro, 1928). Pitcairn was transformed into a key text for the island idyll. However, eventual overcrowding on Pitcairn led all to vacate in 1856 to the then recently abandoned penal colony of Norfolk Island, which occupied a considerably larger land mass. While most stayed on Norfolk, some of the families got homesick and returned to Pitcairn where their descendants remain to his day (Shapiro, 1928). The population has fluctuated ever since, peaking at 250 in 1936. Perhaps owing to its unique isolation, the hybrid Polynesian/English society has only been studied a handful of times and for early anthropologists it represented a unique microcosm of social structure (Amoamo, 2012: 422).

Idyllic accounts of life on the Island were numerous in the 19th and 20th century: women had an equal share to men in election of officials and governance; property was inherited by all children regardless of sex; education was compulsory until 16 years of age; there was a communal fund for food, to which all contributed (Shapiro, 1928). An article from the late 1920s has the Islanders playing sport and as board game devotees, while cooking exotic dishes and engaging in whaling and the production of lemon juice. Selling postage stamps had sustained the Island’s economy until stamp collecting became unfashionable in the 21st century. In 1928, Shapiro reported:

The social life of the islanders is very hearty and informal. Moonlight picnics, garden parties, and other gatherings of a social nature are always hilarious. A strong love of music is common, and one of the most generally attended organizations is the choral society.

The Islanders have been represented as deeply religious and most had converted as Seventh Day Adventists during the 19th century: ‘[i]f there is a focal point that draws and holds the islanders together, it is their religion. As an integrating force it is far stronger and more important in their lives than their political union’ (Ferdon, 1958: 71). The mythologized view of the Island as an idyll, in terms of both place and space, is captured by a traveller in the late 1950s:

But if Pitcairn homes reflect a disinterest in general comfort and spick-and-span shelter, the people themselves demonstrate the fundamental character of the town. This is, like the islander himself, clear and simple: the Lord has provided all the necessary material goods of life, and the most important thing left is to get along with one another. No doors have locks, and no one is ever turned away [. . .] For us Pitcairn Island was a succession of lovely pictures, and it was made more delightful by what are probably the friendliest people in the world.

(Ferdon, 1958: 71)

More recently an ethnography of Pitcairn Island has presented the islanders as highly conscious of the mythology that surrounds the Island and how this has informed their public identity, noting that ‘a clear ideological if not practical division between “us and them” is practiced by the islanders’ (Amoamo, 2012: 422). Present day Pitcairners view themselves as isolated and vulnerable, subject to cultural erosion through increased mobility and migration. This has increased a sense of islandness as manifest in locality and identity. Amoamo (2012) noted that in order to belong in the Pitcairn community certain practices, such as gardening (local food production having always been vital to the community’s survival), had to be adopted by outsiders. Such practices symbolically re-create the boundaries of community and reinforce social capital.

It would take another half-century before the representation of the Island emerged which recast it in terms of place and space, suggesting a more nightmarish vision arising from the integration and isolation of Pitcairn.

Isolation brings forth monsters

For most of its history, Pitcairn lived with a secret sex culture that defined island life. Adultery was not just routine but pervasive, as well as the sexual fondling of infants and socially approved sex games among young children. Incest and prostitution were not unknown. The criminal charges stemmed from the longtime island practice of ‘breaking in’ girls as young as 10.

(Pochnau and Parker, 2007)³

Despite being a British territory, for much of its history, Pitcairn Island had its own legal code. English law books only arrived in 1997 when the Foreign Office shipped a 56 volume set of Halsbury’s Laws of England (1952–1963), which the locals stored in the one-cell jail, which had been used to store life preservers (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). Most Island statutes were designed to address property disputes and Island peculiarities. There was no reference to rape and ‘carnal knowledge’ (sex with a minor) was disputed, with ages ranging from 12–15. The statute of limitations for any crime was six months. Pitcairn law also precluded charges of assault or the holding of private property (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). The then Island police officer (paid US$780.00 a year) and the magistrate (her brother-in-law) had never made an arrest or held court (Pochnau and Parker, 2007).

Sexual promiscuity with underage girls had been tolerated as being part of traditional values (New Zealand Herald, 2004). One local Councillor told a visiting pastor at the turn of the century that the age of consent had been 12 on the Island and evidence indicates that most girls bore children between the ages of 12 and 15. By the time of the Second World War one pastor complained that the Island’s youth were without ambition and boys sought to ‘break in’ young girls on the Island, with the most ambitious seeking to break in all the young girls on the Island (Pochnau and Parker, 2007).

From 1997, London dispatched a police officer for nine weeks a year to train the local Pitcairn officer. At this time, allegations of sexual assault emerged. Immediately there was conflict between the two officers as to the interpretation of the law, with the local officer reluctant to act (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). A social worker sent to the Island also ‘began to untangle a society in which sex permeated everything: childhood sex games were commonplace, as were pregnancies and abortions among young, unmarried girls’ (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). The social worker shocked London officials with reports that ‘early sexual (manipulation for comforting babies) activity’—much as other societies might use a pacifier—‘has been a feature of life for many years’ (Pochnau and Parker, 2007).

Further concerns were raised in 1999 by a UK officer on temporary assignment in the Island and over two years officers from the UK, Australia and New Zealand interviewed every woman who had lived on the Island in the previous 20 years, as well as the accused men (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). As a result of investigations, Islanders faced 55 charges and those living abroad 41 charges, which were heard in a separate trial in New Zealand (2005). The Pitcairn Island sexual assault trials (2004) involved seven men living on Pitcairn Island and six men living abroad. The population totalled 47 in 2004, so the charges represented a third of the Island’s male population. The charges related to sexual offences against children and young people; more than 30 of the complaints made in Pitcairn could be defined as rape under English laws, with all against girls underage at the time (Farran, 2007; Pochnau and Parker, 2007). Details of the crimes included horrific sexual assaults including gang rape of an 11-year-old (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). Sexual incidents were often attended by violence. One victim of rape stated ‘I have seen some of the fights. All I’ve associated with sex on Pitcairn is violence’ (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). A British social worker (in Pochnau and Parker, 2007) visiting the Island in early 2000 stated, ‘[i]t’s the most dysfunctional community on the face of the planet’. According to Pochnau and Parker (2007), the social worker reported that:

Many were in a state of denial, and many of the women, even mothers, blamed the girls. At first the men were confused and terrified. They were weepy, and some appeared depressed and withdrawn [. . .] One feared he would be murdered in jail. A mother feared the British would hang her son—Mutineers’ justice.

The scandal showed that Britain had known about the ‘moral degeneracy’ on Pitcairn for more than a century, but Colonial administrators had failed to act on numerous complaints, showing more concern with the failure to fly the imperial flag daily (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). The trial was marked by legal challenges to the Island’s status as a British colony, with the defendants claiming that their ancestors, all descended from Bounty mutineers, had renounced their citizenship by committing a capital offence in the burning of the Bounty in 1790 (Farran, 2007). Pitcairners were unified by the time of the trial in mutual contempt for the British who had ‘occupied’ their territory and some Islanders saw the trial as a plot to de-populate their Island (Marks, 2004). However, while the Islanders blamed the intervention on outsiders there were signs of internal conflict and pressure was placed on local women to withdraw charges, some of whom did. Meetings of 13 Island women endorsed the idea that underage sex was normalized and participants had been willing.

The trials had a major impact on Island life, as the accused consisted of a large proportion of the Island’s population. Sons and partners of women living on the Island were among the accused, most drawn from four interrelated families on Pitcairn who had long been interdependent on each other for survival. Notably, the most able-bodied Islanders, the seamen, were jailed (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). Some women claimed the trial was a plot to jail the able-bodied men and close the Island. The famed Australian author Colleen McCulloch, wife of a Pitcairn descendent, defended the customs stating ‘[i]t’s Polynesian to break our girls in at 12’ (Pochnau and Parker, 2007).

Geography was important to constructing the trial narrative. In particular the vastness of the Pacific was at the heart of the narratives and the Island was positioned as ‘isolated’ both by its geography and its ‘culture of secrets’ (Fletcher, 2008: 63). The fact the trial took place on the Island and involved a flotilla of outsiders, including journalists, added to the interest in the story (Fletcher, 2008: 60). The trial was described as ‘one of the strangest in British legal history’ and it has been argued that the guiding terms of the news discourse were ‘strangeness’ and ‘isolation’ (Fletcher, 2008: 62). Pitcairn had always been notorious because of its mutineer history, but the trial reinvested in this notoriety and was reported in places as far away as Kazakhstan and Bahrain (Fletcher, 2008: 60). Australian and international headlines were lurid: ‘Where underage sex is “like food”’ (Harvey, 2004: 1). In the media discourse, ‘isolation’ became an anti-idyll—‘Pitcairn is simply too far away for safety’, as one Australian journalist put it (Fletcher, 2008: 63).

The Islanders were reported to indulge in lots of gossip, fuelled and intensified by sexual habits (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). An Australian reporter was quoted as saying: “[y]ou are never, ever alone. In that remote place, in the middle of nowhere, you’d think your problem is loneliness, but actually your problem is trying to get away from everyone. There’s nowhere to go’ (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). The Mayor, also charged, stated that sex preoccupied the Island and sexual shenanigans occupied Island gossip:

Mrs Darralyn Griffiths, 28, said she started having sex at 13, ‘and I felt hot shit about it, too’. Meralda Warren, 45, said her sex life began at 12. Nadine Christian, 32, said: ‘It was just the way it was. It goes way back. It’s been happening for generations. You have to remember the kids here don’t have any entertainment.’ But others hinted at cracks in this image of carefree sexual precocity. Carol Warren, 51, said a Pitcairn man tried to rape her when she was 10. She also said she complained to police about her daughter’s relationship with an older married man, which began when she was 13.

Despite her own experience, Mrs Warren said she was certain no girl on the island had ever had sex against her will. She said it was ‘sick’ to have sex with a girl before she reached puberty, and she could not believe any islander could have done that. Mrs Christian added: ‘There are no secrets on Pitcairn, I can tell you.’

(Marks, 2004)

One witness stated on trial in Auckland ‘I don’t know any married people on Pitcairn who have been faithful to each other’. Her husband, the former magistrate, also charged, retold how sex education was where he had seen a schoolteacher having sex with a student when he was young and his friends had witnessed one of their parents in bed with the parent of another (Pochnau and Parker, 2007). Dea Birkett, in her book Serpent in Paradise (1997), claimed that all the Islanders cared about were ‘the three F’s—fishing, food and fucking’ (Pochnau and Parker, 2007).

All but one of the defendants were convicted of some of the charges they were facing. Two, who showed remorse, were sentenced to community service and the remaining Islanders to prison terms from two to six years. One got six years for four rapes (Fletcher, 2008). The penalties were reported by the British High Commission in New Zealand to have been tailored to Pitcairn and accounted for its unique isolation and population size.

Discussion

Pitcairn, due not only to its isolated and in accessible location but also because, for nearly two centuries, the islanders have fiercely regulated who may visit (and live on) the island. Pitcairn constitutes a small, tight-knit and kin-related grouping. Insularity, governed by strong religious doctrine and its own practice of self-government, has in part formed the social ‘glue’ that continues to bind the community.

(Amoamo, 2012: 423)

The ‘social glue’ of Pitcairn has been a source of idyllization and horror. A key aspect of the island-idyll is the notion that islands embody ‘communitarian’ qualities. Communities are seen as collections of people sharing certain interests, sentiments, behaviour and objects by virtue of their membership of a social group (Amoamo, 2012: 427). Community has often been equated with simple social structures, but rural and island spaces are not necessarily simpler and management of intimate relationships in such places can often be complex and require significant resources.

Braithwaite (1989) argued that communitarian societies, which combine a dense network of individual interdependencies with strong cultural commitments of mutuality and obligation, have a significant capacity to deliver potent forms of shaming, which produce social integration and lower levels of crime. He concluded that cultural homogeneity is a precondition for effective social control, including reintegrative shaming (Braithwaite, 1989: 94). The case of Pitcairn demonstrates a strong sense of Island communitarianism, illustrated for instance in the interdependency of the Island’s families and the role of local gossip and surveillance in encouraging compliance with local norms.⁴ This type of communitarianism embodies what sociologists have described as gemeinschaft qualities. These qualities, so often considered elements of small rural communities, might also be perceived as features of islandness. And while the concept of gemeinschaft has been relatively forgotten in the social sciences, the qualities it evoked have recently been captured by the concept of social capital, which has been theorized in various ways, but generally describes features of social organization, such as relations of honesty, cooperation, reciprocity, engagement and mutuality that exist between people within social networks of varying density (Bourdieu, 1986; Coleman, 1988; Portes, 2000; Putnam, 2000; Rostila, 2010).

The idea of social capital has been much deployed in analysis of rural crime, especially with regard to social disorganization theory where it functions as a form of social control by supporting social norms that limit anti-social behaviour (Woodhouse, 2006). Putnam (2000) and others have supported the view that high rates of interpersonal violence suggest the absence of strong social capital (Woodhouse, 2006).

Putnam (2000) has discussed the relative density of social networks with reference to bonding and bridging ties. Bonding ties are evident in closed and intimate groups in which all members are connected and interact exclusively with one another. These ties are inward looking and occur among people who see themselves as homogenous and coming from the same social network (Rostila, 2010). In contrast, bridging capital is outward looking and represents the links between different groups of people. It has been posited that a lack of both types of ties results in alienation and loneliness and what Durkheim referred to as anomie, often viewed as a condition of urbanized settings (Woodhouse, 2006).

Much research in criminology has suggested that smaller, often rural communities, have an abundance of bonding capital and are cohesive and friendly places with low levels of crime. As such, they are considered relatively safe. It appears that Pitcairn has strong bonding capital within what might be described as a closed social network. However, Pitcairn’s high-density social network and associated social capital was supportive of crime. This marries with a body of research, still emerging, which has presented a different picture of crime in remote (rural) settings, suggesting high rates of interpersonal violence, especially domestic violence (Carrington, 2007; Lievore, 2003; Websdale, 1995). This research suggests that the ecology of rural places and more broadly, remote and isolated places, can be criminogenic.

This may not be the case with regard to all crime. Carrington’s (2007) research, for example, found property crime in rural and remote settings to be relatively low, while interpersonal violence was relatively high. Certainly, the ecology of an isolated and geographically bounded setting might provide a formal degree of natural surveillance not afforded elsewhere, which might prevent certain highly visible crimes (e.g. property offences), but the very same surveillance can increase regulation and with it forms of social control. An excess of bonding capital can produce intolerance and insularity. For example, crime in remote areas is often blamed on newcomers or temporary visitors to closed communities. The revelations of sexual assault at Pitcairn appeared to increase some sense of solidarity among Islanders while producing hostility to outsiders, seen in terms of the media, but especially in terms of the British government. But while this might explain aspects of the social integration on the island, it hardly explains the normative structure in which sexual violence became commonplace.

The fact remains that sexual violence was for a long time tolerated in this community and had become normative. This was despite the mutineers being British subjects (presumably somewhat aware of British laws) and also despite the influence of Christianity. During the trials, some of the accused argued that, because sexual violence had become custom on the Island (and was not considered a crime), they should escape culpability. As Farran (2007: 142, 150) explains:

Even if the mutineers had taken with them this invisible mantle of the common law, it has been recognized [. . .] that common law transplanted to a foreign soil may develop differently. To hold that present day Pitcairners had the same common law as the Bounty settlers seems to ignore the passage of over two hundred years of living in a small and very isolated community [. . .] Can a legal system and its representatives, nurtured in such a totally different context even begin to understand or experience the life and values of people living in such an isolated environment?

The relative isolation of the Island thus provided fertile soil for the subversion of British constructions of crime, as well as Christian constructions of faith. The normative values of the Islanders were informed by the social structures particular to the Island, which in turn were informed by the Island’s history and the everyday practices which sustained life on the Island. In this way, it might be said that integration in this context can both prevent and generate crime, making the very concept of integration so fluid and ambiguous as to render it problematic as a variable in the analysis of crime. Similarly, as also noted by others (e.g. Liu, 2004; Villalonga-Olives and Kawachi, 2017), social capital might be considered neutral or even negative, rather than being associated with beneficial or positive outcomes, since it may equally relate to both. Furthermore, membership of any community will come at a price of conforming to the values of the community and repression of individual expression (Woodhouse, 2006). Thus, the strong ties that bind a group together and enable it to succeed can also exclude other members of society, especially those in marginalized groups.

This is an important point in how we might understand isolated and socially integrated places, such as islands. The question of import to criminologists thus shifts from whether and to what extent people are integrated into the normative structures of communities, to the nature of those normative structures. Pitcairn, from its earliest years, was a patriarchal society where sex was not highly regulated because of an apparent need to procreate and maintain the Island’s population. This was especially the case during the 20th century, when the population declined as a result of outward migration. It was an exotic and imaginative place to the outside world, but for locals, islandness was expressed in determination to remain on the Island and live as an economically self-sustaining community, despite population and economic decline (Amoamo, 2012: 422). Constructs of ‘community’ vital to islandness and the romanticism of the Bounty was invoked in frequent references to ‘mutiny’ in news coverage, so that it was impossible to separate the past from the present (Fletcher, 2008: 64). Pitcairners viewed themselves as a distinct culture with their own normative values and practices that were rationalized with reference to the Island’s geographic and demographic vulnerability and with appeal to ‘tradition’.

Pratt (2006: 541) has examined New Zealand’s relatively high rates of imprisonment and ‘history of intolerance and punitiveness in its reaction to criminal behaviour’. He argues that everyday life in New Zealand possessed a veneer of social cohesion, homogeneity, security and conformity which resulted in the popular view of it, both internally and abroad, as a ‘paradise’. Indeed, this view of New Zealand as egalitarian was reinforced by social conditions which discouraged ostentatious displays of wealth or status. Not unlike Pitcairn Island, the geography of New Zealand—its relative isolation and remoteness—informed its norms and social structures. However, as Emile Durkheim observed, in a society where these qualities become exaggerated, intolerance of non-conformists and law breakers becomes excessive. At the same time, punishment of transgressors reasserts and conforms such qualities, reaffirming conformity and what Durkheim referred to as the collective conscience. Pratt (2006: 555) concludes that ‘the same set of conditions that made New Zealand an inclusionary society also had the effect of making it an exclusionary one’. What is relatively unique in the Pitcairn Island case, but has been documented elsewhere in cases of sexual assault (see Carrington and Johnson, 1994), is how the politics of place and belonging operated in a way which inverted the Durkheimian formulation that the punishment of the offender promotes social solidarity and reinforces the collective conscience. In this case, sympathy for the offenders and antipathy towards the British legal system reinforced a sense islandness.

As a final note, modern forms of structuration, in the form of wealth and classes for example, were less evident in the Pitcairn environment than in mainland environments and larger islands. Status symbols, such as the motor car, had no place in Pitcairn life. As early observers concluded, Pitcairn was a relatively classless environment. But in the absence of class, what other normative orders took precedence to structure and define community? Biological markers based on sex, generation and kinship were highly prevalent on the Island. It was these markers which informed power on the Island and with it a normative order which was like glue, yet criminogenic when British legal structures ultimately superseded it. As suggested here, the absence of class does not automatically produce an idyllic existence.

Conclusion

A project of southern criminologies seeks to draw attention to centre–periphery relations (Carrington et al., 2016). As places, islands are situated on the periphery of peripheries. The smallest and remotest are viewed as fragile and dependent places, their value to the centre typically considered in terms of consumption. Islands, both in terms of place and space, can inform southern criminologies and, with rural criminologies, form part of a criminology that challenges urban bias. In contrast to studies of tourism and crime on islands, the vital question is not whether islands have more or less crime than other places, but how crime is defined in an island setting, which crimes are policed and visible, who defines crime and who is subject to regulation? Vitally, all these questions are informed by what is referred to here as the politics of place and belonging.

Island criminologies need to take care not to mythologize islands as places of either idyllization or horror. Rather, analysis should concern how crime and criminology itself constructs such myths. So, on one level, island criminologies might be said to be concerned with islands as places and analyse how crime problems are constructed and interpreted in island spaces through the prism of islandness. On another level, a spatial criminology of islands might examine how the geography of islands produces distinctive social networks, distinct normative structures and distinct forms of social control. At the crux of these projects is an understanding of power structures, in terms of island communities and at a broader geo-political level. Attention to islands is timely given the interest in southern, Indigenous and Neo-Colonial criminologies, in a shift from the metropole. While the physical and demographic diversity of such places must be appreciated, there is a need to understand crime in islands as places of production (agriculture, industry), consumption (tourism, retirement sites) and exclusion (detention centres, prisons). South (2019) has recently examined the phenomenon of eco-enclaves of various kinds as places of salvation and segregation from which to escape a global ecological crisis. Here, islands, some man-made and some floating, may become places of self-segregation, as opposed to places of banishment or exile, as they were in the past. The very qualities of islandness, a source for utopian visions, are readily inverted because the isolation and bounded nature of the island inform the politics of belonging. This article has gone some way to doing this, taking initial tentative steps towards charting an island criminology. However, further work is needed until the potential of a more comprehensive island criminology can be realized.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

John Scott

Notes

Author biographies

John Scott is a professor in the School of Justice, at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He has written on a wide range of topics, including sexual and gendered crime, rural crime and drug supply. He currently co-edits the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy and Crime and Justice in Asia and the Global South (Routledge) and is Vice President of the Asian Criminological Society.

Zoe Staines is a research fellow with the School of Social Science, University of Queensland. She has published in the areas of policing, social policy and rural/remote crime and governance. She was recently awarded an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award to further her work into remote community experiences of social policy and is also an Associate Editor of the Australian Journal of Social Issues.

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