Child rapist Maurice Van Ryn sentenced over repeated abuse of NSW teen boy
Alasdair McDonald
Confessed child rapist Maurice Van Ryn has been sentenced to nine years' jail after admitting to the repeated sexual abuse of a teenage boy.
NSW District Court Judge Sean Grant described how the 64-year-old former dairy chief executive created a "paedophile friendly environment" involving "computer games and alcohol", designed to take advantage of the boy, who he admitted to abusing on the South Coast between 2010 and 2011.
Judge Grant said Van Ryn, who is currently serving a sentence for child sex offences committed against nine children (4th story on link), saw his victim as a "sexual object for conquest and satisfaction", describing his behaviour as "abhorrent".
In the Bega District Court on Friday, he sentenced Van Ryn to nine years' jail commencing on April 10, 2020, and extended his current non-parole-period by 12 months, meaning he could be eligible for release on April, 9, 2029, at the age of 74.
Van Ryn, who appeared via audio visual link from the maximum security Hunter Correctional Centre, inside Cessnock Correctional Complex, looked dishevelled and appeared to attempt to hide his face from the camera as details of his offending were read to the court.
Judge Grant applied a 25 per cent discount for Van Ryn's early guilty plea in March to four counts of aggravated sexual intercourse with a child aged between 14 and 16, which included three counts of performing oral sex on his victim and one count of anal intercourse.
He described Van Ryn as a "very intelligent man", and told the court the offences were "very serious" and not isolated incidents. "Such a sentence is just and appropriate and could not be considered crushing or destroy any expectation of a useful life after his release," Judge Grant said.
I'm OK with 'crushing or destroying any expectation of a useful life after his release'. He has certainly made his victims lives much more difficult, if not impossible. He doesn't deserve a 2nd chance - he abused 10 children. Shall we put 10 more at risk?
He said aggravating factors included Van Ryn's abuse of his position of trust with his victim. "The offender relied upon his position in the community to ingratiate himself with the victim allowing the abuse to occur," Judge Grant said.
The court heard Van Ryn had offered his victim $50 cash for oral sex, which the victim refused, and would also give the boy money for odd jobs, and for "no apparent reason".
The court heard Van Ryn met up with his victim, who had moved interstate, one more time after the offences when he was aged over 16.
Judge Grant said Van Ryn's behaviour was "predatory" and deliberately "comfortable and generous" while built on "power and inequality", emphasising the "degrading nature of the relationship".
Judge Grant quoted statements from Justice Peter McClellan, president of the Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Sex Abuse, during the opening of hearings in 2013. "What many may consider to be low levels of abuse of boys and girls can have catastrophic consequences for them, leading to a life which is seriously compromised from what might otherwise have been," Judge Grant told the court.
"Both boys and girls are left with a distrust of adults and difficulties with intimacy."
And about 50 more symptoms like suicide, depression, PTSD, alcohol/drug addictions, learning difficulties, etc., etc., etc.
Judge Grant said the victim suffers from flashbacks, episodes of self-harm, anxiety, relationship and trust issues with suicidal ideation due to Van Ryn's repeated abuse. The victim indicates his prison is his thoughts and he faces those thoughts daily for the rest of his life," Judge Grant said.
Toronto police arrest 81 y/o man on child pornography charges
The Canadian Press
Toronto police have charged an 81-year-old man as part of an investigation into possession of child sex abuse material.
Two of the charges relate to possession of child pornography.
The man was also charged with obstructing a peace officer, failing to attend court and three counts of failing to comply with a recognizance.
Police say was arrested Friday in the Lansdowne Avenue and Queen Street West area.
Joseph Reischer of Toronto was scheduled to make a court appearance Saturday at Old City Hall.
Another man accused of child abuse found dead on morning of trial - UK
By Joe Thomas, Echo
An alleged child abuser was found dead on the morning his trial was due to start.
Anthony Walls faced eight counts of historic sex abuse, including two charges of indecency with a child.
Other allegations included four counts of indecent assault on a man, one count of sexual activity with a child and one of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.
The 57-year-old denied the accusations at a pre-trial preparation hearing in last month.
He was due to attend Liverpool Crown Court on Monday, April 29 - the day his trial was due to start.
However Walls, of Hughson Street in Toxteth, was found dead at the property when emergency services were called to the home after receiving concerns for the safety of a man.
A spokeswoman for Merseyside Police said: "Officers were called to Hughson Street, Liverpool, just after 9.15am on 29th April following reports of a concern for safety of a man in the area.
"Emergency Services gained access to the property where a 57 year old man was found deceased.
"His next of kin have been informed. His death is not being treated as suspicious."
I guess we can assume that is a guilty plea.
South African Police Service warn against sharing
child sexual assault video
child sexual assault video
– African News Agency (ANA)
Brigadier Vish Naidoo, spokesperson for the country’s national police commissioner, said the clip was being shared via social media.
The South African Police Service (SAPS) warned members of the public on Saturday that sharing a video clip of an alleged sexual of a child in the bathroom of a “popular family restaurant” was a criminal offence.
“Please note that the mere act of sharing this video constitutes a criminal offence as both parties allegedly involved are children and their identities may not be disclosed.
“The matter is being throughly investigated by the Family Violence Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit,” said Naidoo.
Former teacher tricks hundreds of children into performing sex acts and sending indecent images
Science teacher posed as teenage girl on social media to deceive pupils
Conrad Duncan
The Independent
A former teacher who tricked more than 200 pupils into performing sex acts by posing online as a teenage girl has pleaded guilty to child sexual abuse charges.
Alaric Bristow set up fake social media profiles to talk to the boys, aged between 13 and 15, and collected more than 1,000 indecent images of them.
He pleaded guilty to 12 charges of causing a child to engage in sexual activity, nine of making indecent images of children and one of having prohibited images.
Judge Peter Cooke sentenced Bristow to five years in prison and said he must serve at least three.
He had targeted a total of 213 boys and many of the victims had been his pupils, the judge said.
The former teacher, who worked at schools in the Midlands, will also have to register as a sex offender for life.
“You were leading a double life, imparting knowledge during the day, but leading a dark secret life at night,” Mr Cooke said. “I am satisfied there is a significant risk that you will commit further specified offences in the future and cause serious harm to members of the public, most likely young people.”
So, what are you doing about that, judge? 3 years will go by pretty quickly then he will be back at it.
The court was told how West Midlands Police raided Bristow’s home, where he lived with his mother and brothers, last September after receiving information of suspicious internet activity.
Police officers were shocked to find a huge quantity of indecent images on his laptop and hard drive, along with the method he had used to obtain them.
Bristow kept meticulous records of the names of the boys, the false profiles he used when contacting them and the images he had sent and received.
He also created PowerPoint presentation “trophies” of his achievements, the court heard.
The former teacher admitted to creating the fake profiles to obtain images and videos of his victims but claimed he had never met or had any intention of having physical contact with any of the boys.
As is what he did wasn't bad enough. It was child sex abuse and ought to be penalized as though you were right there molesting them.
Detective Constable Ian Russell, from West Midlands Police's Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team, said: “Even after his initial arrest, Bristow could not abstain from his deviant behaviour and breached his bail conditions by obtaining a laptop and accessing the internet to continue offending.
“As a school teacher he was in a position of trust and should have known the devastating emotional effect this type of abuse can have on young people.”
Prosecutor John O’Higgins praised police for the “enormous investigation", which involved 20 specialist officers at one stage to trace all the boys involved.
West Midlands, UK
Secrets of Pitcairn, the tropical island that covered up a child-sex scandal
Pitcairn Island lies in the middle of the South Pacific, 1,300 miles from Tahiti.
Nigel Richardson
The Telegraph
When 29-year-old Rhiannon Adam arrived to photograph the South Pacific island made famous by the mutiny on the Bounty, she thought it would be an immersion in a strange, remote world. But rocked by child-abuse scandals, the locals were hostile and a culture of silence culminated in the worst experience of her life
Pitcairn Island, the South Seas refuge of the most famous renegades in British maritime history, did not ask to be called a paradise. ‘Hollywood romanticised the whole mutiny on the Bounty thing,’ said Pawl Warren, the first Pitcairner I met on my recent voyage there, ‘but they never followed up what happened afterwards. It became quite bloody, brutal.’
A gentle giant of a man, 56-year-old Warren is directly descended on his mother’s side from the mutiny’s Fletcher Christian and his Tahitian partner, Maimiti. His piratical piercings and tattoos play up to the mutineer image, but he is a thoughtful student of his island’s backstory, in all its confounding complexities. He was born on Pitcairn, spent nearly three decades in New Zealand and was living back on the island when events took place that have threatened its very existence.
‘It’s just another dark page in the history of the island,’ he said, referring to the trial and conviction of six Pitcairn men in 2004 for more than 30 sexual offences against children. Two more men were convicted in 2007 (the youngest of their victims being seven years old) and in 2016 there was an aftershock when an islander was found guilty of possessing over 1,000 pornographic images of children.
Last November the Pitcairn community attempted to draw a symbolic line under what happened by creating and unveiling a marble ‘reconciliation plaque’ in the cemetery. Time to move on, they say. But the storm engendered by these child-abuse scandals rumbles on in the place the islanders cannot control – the outside world. And the consequences may yet be terminal. According to one informed observer and critic of the community, London-based photographer Rhiannon Adam, the island community is ‘on the precipice of extinction’.
This British Overseas Territory (a status it shares with Bermuda, Tristan da Cunha and 11 others), marooned more or less at the midway point in the South Pacific Ocean between Australasia and South America, is a heck of a place to get to. There is no landing strip. Supply vessels and the occasional cruise ship are its sole lifeline and visitors are consequently few. From Pitcairn’s very inception, this lack of contact with the wider human community created a barrier of misunderstanding and suspicion on the part of the islanders that will never be dispelled.
The history
I sailed there from Papeete in Tahiti, some 1,200 nautical miles north-west of Pitcairn, on a cargo vessel with passenger cabins called the Aranui 5. During the five-day passage, we followed the approximate route of the Bounty mutineers. On the morning of 28 April 1789, for reasons that remain a matter of conjecture, first mate Fletcher Christian and his fellow rebels took over HMS Bounty and turfed its captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, and the 18 crew who stayed loyal to him, into the ship’s launch. (And in this 23ft open boat the much-maligned Bligh masterminded one of the great voyages of survival, across 3,600 miles of open sea to Timor.)
Seeking an island sanctuary in which they would never be discovered, the mutineers happened on a tiny (two miles by one mile), uninhabited, steep-sided volcanic rock marked on the charts as ‘Pitcairn’s Island’. There were nine mutineers, 11 Tahitian women, six Tahitian men and one child (the women had been effectively kidnapped in Tahiti when Christian ordered the Bounty’s anchor cable be cut after they came aboard for supper).
Within a decade all but one (John Adams) of the original mutineers and all of the Tahitian men had died or been killed in acts of mutual bloodletting – the ‘bloody, brutal’ history referred to by Warren. Today’s population (of 40) retains strong links to the original mutineers – 26 have direct blood lines – and is not much bigger than the first community of 1790.
On board the Aranui 5, I met a tenth of Pitcairn’s current inhabitants – that is to say four people, including Warren (the many Bounty obsessives aboard were dazzled to meet him) and London-born Leslie Jaques, who was Pitcairn’s commissioner (a UK government appointment) at the time of the trial – and is now an elected councillor with a brief to represent Pitcairn overseas and develop tourism on the island.
‘Pirate’ Pawl Warren CREDIT: RHIANNON ADAM
Pitcairn, said Jaques, was an economic ‘basket case’ when he took over as commissioner in 2003, just before the child-abuse scandal broke. It had been eking a surplus principally by selling its rare stamps, but between 1990 and 2000 revenues plummeted to the point where Pitcairn went bankrupt and needed the mother country to bail it out.
Fifteen years on from the trial, Pitcairn remains aid-dependent, currently receiving about £3 million annually from the Department for International Development (DFID) and further contributions from the EU’s European Development Fund – amounting to more than €7 million since 2007. Brexit is likely to leave the island poorer. ‘What will replace EU funding will be a bidding process in which the little people will probably miss out,’ reckoned Jaques.
Aid aside, the principal issues affecting Pitcairn’s long-term survival are repopulation and employment. The population peaked in the 1930s at about 230 and has been dropping and ageing for the past two decades – a big problem in an environment that makes considerable physical demands of its inhabitants (working the ‘longboats’ that provide a link to visiting vessels, maintaining roads, operating heavy machinery and so on). ‘The current workforce is about 30, which is too low and which means things don’t happen and don’t get done,’ said Jaques.
On its website the island administration targets the kind of people ‘who enjoy the outdoors, are at home in the natural, unspoilt environment, and would welcome the opportunity to be part of a small but lively community’ with the slogan ‘Live the Dream… Make the Change… Move to Pitcairn Island’.
But there have been few takers. The damage suffered by Pitcairn from 2004 still hangs over the island. The first thing you notice about Pitcairn is its air of introversion. Its fortress-like crags and red cliffs are draped in tropical foliage and it has no natural anchorage.
There are now only three primary school-age children on Pitcairn, including Cushana, who was six when this photo was taken. She is never left alone with island men CREDIT: RHIANNON ADAM
Coming ashore is difficult in the generally huge swells that buffer the island. There is no Polynesian welcome for new arrivals, no leis round the neck or lilting songs. Bandy-legged men in singlets and shorts wait with quad bikes and battered pick-ups to transport the Aranui passengers from the jetty, up the steep incline known as the Hill of Difficulty, to the main settlement of Adamstown. Mostly European-Polynesian in appearance, islanders speak English to visitors but among themselves some also use a creole known as Pitkern. This is a mash-up of Tahitian and 18th-century English. For ‘tomorrow’ they say ‘on the morrow’. A gun is a ‘musket’.
Rhiannon's experience
Into this world in 2015 sailed 29-year-old Rhiannon Adam. She disembarked from a cargo ship to spend 96 days here, living with various families in order to create a photographic record of the island and its people and make a documentary for BBC Radio 4. This summer the Photographers’ Gallery in London will be exhibiting some of her Pitcairn work and in the autumn a book of her photographs will be published. ‘I didn’t anticipate that the project would take the turns that it did,’ she told me when we met in London. ‘My mistake and possibly my only naivety is that I thought they would be wanting change, wanting to right past wrongs.’
Pitcairn is hardly the South Seas paradise of popular imagination. There are scarcely any beaches, few long views of the surrounding ocean. Its cliffs and coastal features have names that speak of danger and alarm: Where Tom Fall, Oh Dear, Break im Hip. At its heart, Adamstown is a cluster of buildings that provide the basic needs of the community.
The convicted rapists served their sentences at HMP Pitcairn CREDIT: RHIANNON ADAM
There’s a Seventh-Day Adventist church (many islanders are teetotal, at least officially), a post office, a public hall, a medical centre, a store, a police station. A 10-minute walk away is the primary school, where the current roll is three (at the age of 13 children go to secondary school in New Zealand). Scattered across the terrain among Norfolk Island pines and coconut palms are the 20 or so mostly single-storey wooden houses in which Pitcairners live in an agreeable subtropical climate (winter low 17C; summer high 30C).
They catch and eat plenty of fish, tropical fruit and vegetables grow in profusion in the fertile soil, and the island’s famously disease-free bees provide premium honey, which they also export. Households are connected to the internet and telephone system via a satellite link and, weather permitting, they also receive a TV channel from Australia.
For fans of the mutiny who arrive on cruise and cargo ships, there are sites and artifacts to make the trip worthwhile: a rusting Bounty cannon, the ship’s anchor, the grave of John Adams (the whereabouts of the remains of the rest of the mutineers is unknown), a little museum.
Feeding the legend is the islanders’ raison d’être. ‘All of their jobs are around playing the part, it is like putting on a Mickey Mouse costume,’ said Adam. Along the main road of Adamstown, the day I arrived, islanders had set out curio stalls where they were flogging wood carvings of fish, Bounty-themed T-shirts and rare stamps to the passengers of Aranui 5. These avatars of legendary men, who advertise their family links to the Bounty by posting up their names and signing their handiwork, chatted happily and posed for photographs. Families can make up to $10,000 a year from the trade with tourists. But there’s another kind of visitor whose presence they resent.
The 2004 trial and its aftermath not only forced Pitcairn Island to confront dark truths about itself but distilled Pitcairn’s suspicions of the outside world. Whatever internal acrimony there may be, Pitcairners dislike outsiders far more than they dislike each other and will unite against perceived external threats. And nobody poses more of a threat than a curious and independent-minded photojournalist. From the outset, says Adam, she encountered paranoia and hostility. Her three months on Pitcairn would become ‘the hardest experience of my whole life’.
The 2004 trial is pretty much a taboo subject. But one of the stallholders I talked to was prepared to discuss it. Mike Lupton-Christian, originally from Ilkley in West Yorkshire, is married to Brenda Christian. ‘What was difficult was, she was the island police officer,’ he said, referring to the fact that in 2004 Brenda Christian was required to arrest her own brother, the then-mayor Steve Christian (he was subsequently convicted of five rapes). Not being Pitcairn-born, Lupton-Christian managed to avoid inter- and intra-family rancour. ‘If it was awkward for me it was only because I was British,’ he said.
The UK government made enemies of the Pitcairners over its decision to proceed with the trial, which developed from initial allegations made to a British police officer serving on the island in 1999. There was a view that the mores of faraway Britain did not apply in Polynesia – that consensual sex with girls once they hit puberty was the norm in this part of the world and that nothing sinister or inappropriate had taken place. The nature of the offences does not support this interpretation but the motives and intentions of Her Majesty’s Government are still regarded with suspicion. Many islanders believe Britain is looking for an excuse to wash its hands of this remote and costly anachronism.
The 2004 trial was conducted by three judges from New Zealand in the hall in Adamstown. On 24 October, six men were found guilty of child rape and indecent assault. Giving evidence by video link from New Zealand, one of the victims, by then middle-aged, said, ‘You get abused, you get raped. It was the normal way of life on Pitcairn when I was growing up.’
Like many islanders, Pawl Warren did not attend the trial. ‘I chose not to go and find out who did what to who,’ he said. ‘At the end of the day, why do I need to know that? I’m not going to judge anybody for what they’ve done when they’ve done their time. I still have to work side by side with these guys.’
Those convicted did their time in a prison specially constructed on the island in the run-up to the trial, by some of the very men who were then incarcerated within it. The sentences, extremely lenient considering the severity of the offences, were ‘tailored’ by the judge to Pitcairn’s unique circumstances – if deprived for too long of men of working age, the community would have been unable to function. Most offenders were free within two or three years. Stringent child-safeguarding practices are now enforced and the official line, underscored by the recent unveiling of the marble mea culpa plaque in the cemetery, is that the trial and jail sentences belong to another era.
Islanders are understandably reluctant to talk about the abuse survivors. Some may still be on the island. Most live among the 5,000-strong Pitcairn diaspora in New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere. One is said to have been placed in a witness protection programme in New Zealand. The text on the plaque contains these lines: ‘To say we’re sorry does not seek punishment or blame, it doesn’t say they were right and we were wrong, just that we have learnt and understand the error of our ways.’
Steve’s police officer sister Brenda, who arrested former mayor Steve Christian CREDIT: RHIANNON ADAM
On the quayside the current mayor Shawn Christian, son of former mayor Steve, sat down with me and talked up Pitcairn’s prospects: ‘The future of this island, this whole community, is about a bigger, brighter tomorrow. Because in order to have a successful future and even for attracting migrants, the only way to move forward is to reconcile and I’m really pleased the community did support the initiative [of the plaque].’
In 2007 Shawn, now 43, was convicted of the gang rape, with his brother Randy, of a 12-year-old girl. He used his shirt to gag his victim. ‘The community has moved on,’ he told me. ‘We just hope the rest of the world has moved on.’
Rhiannon Adam formed a different opinion during her three-month stay in 2015. ‘Behind closed doors, if you’re there long enough, you start to see the cracks show, to see things fall apart,’ she said. ‘My own experiences were that their ideas about relationships and sex have not come on very far. I don’t think it’s acceptable that I go to sleep at night and a man decides to enter my bedroom through the window.’
This was the second of two related episodes that would define her experience on Pitcairn Island. The man in question had developed a crush on Adam that started innocently enough but degenerated into inappropriate behaviour. Previously, she had found him naked in her bedroom – an incident she described as ‘quite terrifying’. Even worse, she had heard other islanders goading him on to ‘get the girl’.
Shawn Christian, current mayor, who was convicted of gang rape CREDIT: RHIANNON ADAM
His behaviour ramped up because of the pressure, she told me. She said Shawn Christian, as mayor, tried to dissuade her from lodging a complaint with the island police. ‘He said, “If you do this you’re jeopardising our future…” It made me realise that if I didn’t say something, I was going to be just as bad as the Pitcairn Islanders that allowed this to happen for generations. That someone has to say, “You know what, I’m not going to give you a free pass because you’re a Pitcairn Islander, because you’re a special case. For once I’m going to do what I would do if this happened anywhere else in the world.”’ When Adam did make an official complaint, the man was ‘given a talking to’.
Islanders I spoke to were aware of what had happened to Adam. One admitted that ‘she wasn’t treated very well’. Another dismissed her as ‘naive’, blaming the incidents on a cultural misunderstanding – few doors on the island have locks and privacy is a relative concept.
Sooner rather than later, believes Adam, Pitcairn will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Meanwhile, a kind of cognitive dissonance – on the part of the outside world as well as the islanders – helps keep Pitcairn afloat. On my visit I bought some mementos from the curio stalls set up in Adamstown – two carved fish, proudly signed by men (Steve and Randy Christian) I know to be convicted paedophiles. Through the official island website you can book to stay at Steve’s home for £115 per person per night.
The decision by islanders to elect Shawn Christian as mayor was evidently taken with no consideration for the kind of image or message it projects. ‘By allowing him to hold office it’s already saying, “Yeah, but the trial wasn’t really a big deal, was it?”’ said Adam. ‘If you really want Pitcairn Island to have a future, he should be the one stepping down.’ Shawn Christian told me he expected to see the population of Pitcairn double within 20 years, citing the fact that the next day a family of four from the Pitcairn diaspora was moving back to the island, and that they had also received a settlement application from a young Swedish family.
But Adam is sceptical that repopulation will happen on anything like the scale required: ‘Everyone who has left and has experienced life outside can’t imagine themselves back on Pitcairn Island. Those are the people best suited to that kind of life and those people don’t want to go back, so how are you going to persuade anyone else?’
As Pawl Warren said, Pitcairn was never a paradise. Two hundred and thirty years after it was conceived in the disorder of a mutineer’s mind – then idealised in films by the likes of Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson – the experiment sails on through choppy waters, buoyed by its own legend but essentially rudderless. No doubt any islanders reading this will feel justified in their distrust of outside commentators. But, as Adam says, ‘It’s like Lord of the Flies. It’s what happens to humanity when no one is watching.’
Rhiannon Adam’s work on Pitcairn Island and other subjects will be at The Photographers’ Gallery in London from 14 June to 6 October as part of the TPG New Talent exhibition. The book Big Fence/Pitcairn Island, by Rhiannon Adam, will be published in the autumn (Kris Graves Projects, New York).
No comments:
Post a Comment