Child sex now legal in Australia….. if you are black.

Great Debates
1

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/lawrpt/stories/s706299.htm

http://www.discriminations.us/archives/week_2002_10_06.html

WTF? I had always thought Australia was a civilised country. The law says that having sex with a girl under the age of 16 is statuatory rape. This man is clearly guilty under the letter of the law. Worse yet, the girl wanted to leave with her parents after being raped, and she was prevented from doing so with threats of violence involving a firearm. She later refused to cooperate with prosecutors fro some reason. Note that this man has been previouly convicted of beating one of his wives to death.

Yet somehow because the rapist paid the girl’s parents money to have sex with her this is acceptable to Australians because it would have been acceptable in the society that existed in that geographic area 200 years ago. Australia’s legal system has left this girl effectively locked in a house with an abusive, murderous pedophile who, I assume, is still in possession of a firearm despite the much vaunted Autralian gun laws that the US prponents hail as being so effective.

I assume white people in Australia still get convicted and jailed for having sex with 15 year olds. I assume that paying the girl’s parents money to condone the relationship is not a defence for anyone else.

Is it just me, or is this idea of condoning rape provided that it is “not considered aberrant in [the perpetrator’s] society” really dangerous and an easy path to subcultures with frequent abuse of minors?The idea that the Australian people condone having sex with girls presumably as young as young as 10 or 11 (what mattered was that they’d had their first period) is sickening and frightening.

Is it just me, or is this concept of two legal systems for different races really dangerous, not to mention really offensive.

2

I don’t have a problem with Australian law respecting the customs of Aborigines. It has nothing to do with being black, as I’m sure an African who emigrated to Australia would not be afforded the same legal status.

In the US, some of the original people’s signed treaties with the US government so in a sense they are not directly under the juridiction of the US. That’s why native americans can have casino’s as long as it’s within the reservation. Simply being native american does not give you a right to open a casino.

In the US different states have different ages for statutory rape. I believe when marriage is involved the ages sometimes drop. There are probably places in the US where 15 is legal age after marriage.

I’m more shocked by the gun brandishing, threats, and forcible stay at this man’s house, than the fact that they had sex. Now if the sex was indeed forced came or under the threat of violence as opposed to statutory rape then I’m betting he would have been outside aboriginal cultural norms as well. In which case he should prosecuted as simply a rapist.

3

In this particlar jurisdiction the age of consent is not 15, whether marriage is involve dor not.

The man broke the law but was freed precisely because he is black, or more specifically an Aboriginal. Because statuatory rape is traditional for Aborigines it’s not an offence of wich they can be convicted, based solely on race. Doesn’t that strke you as being more than a little racist? Black peope can rape other black people because that is their tradition. If white Australians were exempt from raping black people based solely on race that would not be tolerated would it? Yet surely one could argue that that is traditional in some white societies.

Whether the sex was forced with threats or not is largely irrelevant isn’t it? The man had sex with a girl who legally could not consent. I’m sure many victims of child abuse ‘gave consent’. I assume that under Australian law a victim of a peadophile ‘consenting’ is not a defence.

4

The black in your title is misleading, as its a special case for such aboriginals as still follow traditional tribal ways. This is a small minority and most aboriginals have long been westernised. I believe that the traditional custom of spearing someone as a tribal punishment also has some degree of legal protection. Its all part of an effort to not totally destroy what remains of traditional aboriginal society and let them be.

To pose a question to you, do you think hunter gatherers in the wilderness should have to adhere to all the mores of modern industrial society?

5

Here in Alaska, it is legal for Eskimos to hunt walrus, whales and seals. Whites are not afforded the same right; do you find that dangerous or offensive?

6

My point was that it may not be based soley on race but on a specific legal agreement with the people at hand. That is the case in the US’s treatment of certain aboriginal populations at least. In that sense, it is not that much different from having different laws in different states. I’m curious if race really is all that there is to it.

It seems from the article that the specific customs of those of “Anherm Land” were considered, not just the fact that the man was Aboriginal and certainly not the mere fact he was black. I’d like to see some more thorough opinions on how and why Aborigines have recieved a different legal treatment. A simple assertion that it’s race is not enough for me.

I’m not sure where you’re from, but in an international forum, black is not synonymous with Australian Aborigine. Let’s try to keep it clear.

This seems to be a deceptive use of language here. If it’s not rape, it’s not rape. If Iowa has a lower age of consent than Missouri it would be ridiculous to assert Iowan’s could “rape” people in Iowa but not in Missouri.

Well, the white majority in Australia has already weighed in on what they consider to be traditional.

Whether or not the sex was forced is always a relevant fact. Even though it’s not always a defense.

Not according to the judge.

7

Is it? Can I have a reference for that? This man was living in a house, accepting welfare payments and using firearms. By what standard was he following a traditional lifestyle? What evidence is there that any Aboriginal can not claim the same defence?

But Aborigines also practiced infanticide traditionally. Should this also be legal? Is this legal?

At what stage do citizens of Australia and citizens of the world simply claim that someting is wrong? If pedophilia is justified simply because it was traditionally practiced are there any traditional practices that should be illegal?

I must admit, this line of agument is bizarre. Because something as heinous as child sexual abuse was traditionally practiced it should be allowed to continue to preserve the culture. Is the culture more importan t than the rights of the child?

Any evidence for that? Are you saying that in Australia a man can be dragged kicking and screaming out of his house in front of his wife and children and be speared and have absolutely no legal recourse? I find that hard to believe, and if it is so it is disgaceful. I may recant my previous belief that Australia is civilised when it allows a group of men to torture, mutilate and/or murder another man.

Dangerous for the seals without a doubt, just as affording Eskimos the right to rape children would be dangerous to the children.

Offensive, certainly. Not as offensive as legalising rape for obvious reasons, but offensive nonetheless.

8

Is it? Can I have a reference for that? This man was living in a house, accepting welfare payments and using firearms. By what standard was he following a traditional lifestyle? What evidence is there that any Aboriginal can not claim the same defence?

But Aborigines also practiced infanticide traditionally. Should this also be legal? Is this legal?

At what stage do citizens of Australia and citizens of the world simply claim that someting is wrong? If pedophilia is justified simply because it was traditionally practiced are there any traditional practices that should be illegal?

I must admit, this line of agument is bizarre. Because something as heinous as child sexual abuse was traditionally practiced it should be allowed to continue to preserve the culture. Is the culture more importan t than the rights of the child?

Any evidence for that? Are you saying that in Australia a man can be dragged kicking and screaming out of his house in front of his wife and children and be speared and have absolutely no legal recourse? I find that hard to believe, and if it is so it is disgaceful. I may recant my previous belief that Australia is civilised when it allows a group of men to torture, mutilate and/or murder another man.

Dangerous for the seals without a doubt, just as affording Eskimos the right to rape children would be dangerous to the children.

Offensive, certainly. Not as offensive as legalising rape for obvious reasons, but offensive nonetheless.

9

I have a sneaking suspicion that the presiding magistrate has been wilfully misquoted in this instance.

For at least a decade now, Australian judges and magistrates have been hounded from pillar to post for making findings which indicated that they “just didn’t get it”.

As a result, it’s very rare nowadays for a magistrate - especially one in the Northern Territory where much work has been done to reduce the disconnect between Western and Aboriginal cultures - well it’s just plain rare for a magistrate in an Aboriginal case to make a finding which would “clang” as uncomfortably as what I’m seeing reported here.

I smell a rat. I smell a bit of an agenda crusade to be honest. Most cases like this are handled with extreme discreet jurisprudence. No way is it as black and white as what I’m seeing portrayed here.

10

According to all sources I’ve seen this is not the case. If you have any evidence of such a “specific legal agreement” then please present it so we can debate something that actually exists.

That’s a fairly spurious line of reasoning Clearly in this case ‘Arnhem Land’ and ‘Aboriginal’ are synonomous. Unless of course you are suggesting that if this man had been from any non-Aboriginal Arnhem land culture that this would also have been taken into consideration.

Thank you for pointing out the obvious. The term black is also not synonymous with Negro, yet it is used in that context constantly on these boards.

Can you explain how it is deceptive and how it might not be rape. The man was guilty of having sex with a girl unable to consent. He was charged with and convicted of rape.

I want to hear how you can argue that I am being deceptive by calling it rape, how you can argue that I is not rape and how it is deceptive of me to call it rape.

Have they? Can I see the evidence for this? Can I se the same evidence for what constitutes traditional for blacks? Is tradition based on majority? Is Ramadan traditional amongst Australia’s whites despite only being practiced by a minority? Is rape traditional amongst Aborigines despite being practiced by a minority?

Can we see you evidence for this ** errata**. The articles linked to above say that according to the judge the man had sex with a girl who legally could not consent. “the relationship between the man and the young woman was a consensual relationship…… but that it of course was unlawful because the young woman was under the age of 16 and therefore a breach of the criminal code had taken place.”. Can you support your assertion that the judge found that the girl could legally consent?

11

Reading the first link further, it appears that the girl withdrew the initial complaint of a beating before sex, which therefore was not brought before the court. It also says he was sentenced to 13 months for statuatory rape, not assault or anything else. So from the information the judge was presented with, there was no reason to give the man a 13 month sentence.

Sounds like that girl is in for a horrible life, though :(.

12

Note also that the 2nd link provided in the OP is from an openly agenda positioned website.

Within that link, the following words apply to the story in question - which by the way is well over a year old now…

The website in question is openly designed to manipulate opinion in favour of the author’s views. The quote I’ve lifted above is perilously close to Chinese Whispers syndrome.

In my considered opinion, the 2nd link provided in the OP is sufficiently biased and guilty of 5th party hearsay to make this entire thread - especially considering the matter occurred over a year ago - somewhat disingenuous to be honest.

13

Any basis for this assertion. After I was emailed this story I checked a lot of other websites. They all seem to agree, even those produced by Aboriginal bodies in Australia and OS.

The facts seem very clear. A man was found guilty of raping a child and then threatening her and her family with a firearm. The magistrate sentenced him to serve 24 hours for sexually molesting a child “saying that the case should never have become before a court because Pascoe was exercising his conjugal rights” despite the fact that the girl could not give her consent to marry or to have sex, based on defence argument that “such marriages were common and morally correct under Aboriginal law”.

The magistrate ruled that the man essentially had a right to repeatedly sexually assault the child because the child in question “knew what was expected of her”.

Why do you believe otherwise? What do you believe is true, and why?
It sickens me to think that in a supposedly civilised nation if a child can be convinced by her her family and her rapist that being raped is acceptable and normal and that all she can expect to be raped, a pedophile recieves essentially no penalty for repeatedly raping the child.

It seems to me as though provided an Australian child can be brainwashed by her family into accepting that being raped by a specific person is what is expected of her, that child can’t be raped by that person.

14

Except that he had raped a child of course.

Beleive as you wish. Do you dispute the facts that I presented from that site? I’m not referring to the site’s opinions, I am discussing the facts of the case.

15

Blake, I’m merely responding to a thread that YOU have created.

The onus is on you, not myself, to prove the validity of your stance. You’ve created a thread which wilfully implies that something has happened on the Australian legal scene, like in just the last 48 hours, which has made “Child Rape” perfectly legal, nationwide, if you’re an indiginous Australia. By any yardstick, that’s a very inflammatory thread to create. Hence, the onus is not on us to disprove your stance - by extension - your stance is so outlandish that your stance is one which YOU have to prove to be true.

At this point, your admissions that you’ve been sent emails linking this story to your attention, and the fact that you’ve linked us to a website which is openly a legal lobbying website - well it all says to me that this is a bit of righteous novelty for you.

Fine, but it’s not my job to prove to you that most of us are skeptical about your stance - I’d suggest that’s a given actually.

In closing, you can’t have your cake and eat it too - you can’t argue that you are merely discussing the facts of the case, whilst ALSO reserving the right to brandish maximum hysteria buzzwords such as paedophile, and child rapist etc etc. To mix and match those two philosophies is undoing your credibility it seems to me.

16

Nice attempt at a strawman. I never said that, nor did I imply it.

I don’t know about novelty, but I do tend to get righteous when I see countries condoning the repeated rape of children. I assume that you do not?

And that’s your argument is it? Most of ‘you’ are skeptical of ‘my’ position, so it must be wrong. I love to see a good appela to popularity fallacy now and then, especially when coupled with a blatant ‘you’ and ‘us’ false dichotomy.

You’ve convinced me I’ve got it wrong.

When the terms are applicable and indeed irreplacable they are not buzzwords. What other word is there to refer to a onicted child rapist except pedophile and rapist? Your suggestion that I not use those terms is laughable. If it offends you that I refer to a man convicted of raping a child as a rapist and pedophile then you have problems, but I am not going to stop using those terms because of that. If you can show how the terms are innaccurate then I will cheerflly cease using them.

But of course you can’t do that, so you try to minimise them by calling them buzzwords when they are perfectly accurate descriptives for a man who has raped a child.

17

Okay, maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but if you’re going to put a label on the guy, “pedophile” is not the correct term, as we’ve learned from the Catholic Church scandals. Because the girl was obviously past puberty, the correct term would be “ephebophile”. Calling anybody over 18 who has sex with somebody between 13-17 a “pedophile” is misleading and prejudicial.

I would also point out that in most of the world, for thousands of years, it was traditional for girls to be considered women shortly after their first menses. Boys also became men at a similar age. Yes, even we white people did this until just a few hundred years ago.

It was not until Europeans started imposing their standards on the rest of the world that these former adults suddenly became children. Of course, feminists will claim that this is a victory in that we have at last put an end to thousands of years of child slavery. To which I say, “Bullshit”. Like I read in another thread, it is nothing but the definition of “adult” on paper that has changed.

18

Your sources aren’t all that clear as to the origins really. But this this article may be relevant.

Actually what I was suggesting was that he could have been from a non-Arnhem Aboriginal culture which had different ideas about age and consent that would have allowed prosecution. According to my cite above such a scenario could have played out because the traditions of each area are considered. Thus it is not just race but culture and this decision may not apply to all Aborigines.

Odd that you find it obvious when your use of term confused the issue. Your continous use of the term still confuses me.

Upon further review, I can’t make sense of the appellate ruling. Doesn’t find him innocent, yet gives only a paltry sentence which had probably already been served awaiting trial.

The evidence is Australian law regarding consent which you referenced. I imagine a democratic society could enact a law that was removed from their culture, but I don’t see why they would.

By blacks you mean Australian Aborigines right? Well, for the specific culture of the man in question, that evidence was given in the trial.

This evidence, as I have recently learned is in dispute. Yet it centers, not on the specific age of the girl so much as the relationship to the community which has detoriated since the contact with European cultures. link

I think there is indeed something worrisome about this case (and I am beginning to think that he raped her regardless of statutory laws) but it hinges on larger issues than simply that the girl was 15. Had her community been functioning well, even though such marriages were traditional, it’s likely the events leading to this case would not have transpired. A quote from the link above:

“Traditionally, small bands of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers adhered to a strict kinship system that afforded protection, autonomy and respect to girls and women, says anthropologist Diane Bell, who has written several books on Aboriginal women. Young girls in arranged marriages to older men would be protected by overseeing co-wives and a semi-public life in open-air camps, which ensured that relatives would come running, spears in hand, should sounds of violence echo across the desert.”

19

Maybe you should get upset over the U.S. because in Iowa:
" the age of consent in Iowa is indeed 16 years of age for anyone; as low as 14 for anyone who is less than 5 years of age apart; and as low as 12 years of age under marriage."
link

20

AFAICT, the judge was not presented with anything that would cause him to believe that this was more than statuatory rape. Taking into account the Aboriginal culture, the judge decided that this wasn’t a big deal. (And if the marriage and sex had been consensual, then it would not have been a big deal, IMHO.)

Now, you and I both know that he probably assaulted and raped that poor girl, but the judge can’t find the man guilty of an act that he wasn’t charged with. The people to take issue with are the man and the girl’s family, who apparently dropped the assault charges and didn’t cooperate with the prosecution.