SOLOMON IS: Action needed to halt abuse of children
Updated
In Solomon Islands, the Anglican Church, known as the Church of Melanesia is calling on the government to take urgent action to deal with sexual abuse of children near logging camps. A new report on Commercial Sexual Exploitaion by the Church's Christian Care Centre has been launched in Honiara by Lady Alice Waena, wife of the Solomon Islands Governor General, Nathaniel Waena.
Presenter: Emily Hilton
Speakers: Dr Tania Herbert, Church of Melanesia's Christian Care Centre in Solomon Islands
HERBERT: We found most of the types of commercial sexual exploitation of children, so this included prostitution of children with older men, it also included early marriage, so marriage under the legal age of 15 in the Solomon Islands, and also under the age of 18. It also included using children for the production of pornography, and also children viewing pornography themselves. We also found a couple of cases where children hadn't actually been victims of trafficking but they were at risk of being victims of trafficking.
HILTON: And you mentioned something about false marriages? Could you tell us a bit about that?
HERBERT: Sure what we found in the cases that we found of early marriage was that the children were married to foreign men who were working in the logging camps but they weren't actually marriages at all. Part of Solomon Islands custom is once two people are living together then they'll consider themselves married. So a lot of people will go through more formal custom marriage or civil marriage or a church based marriage, but a lot of people will just live together and then they're considered by the community to be married. So these children who were being married to loggers, themselves and the family believe they were married but it actually wasn't a legal marriage at all. And we also found a number of cases where the man had completed his work at that logging camp and moved to another area or back to his home country and left the girl there.
HILTON: Who are the main perpetrators of the abuse?
HERBERT: The main perpetrators that we found in this report were foreign men, in this case from Malaysia only because that's where the camps were from in this particular area. But it's difficult to say from this report whether they were actually the main perpetrators of the abuse or if those were the stories that the villagers were more likely to tell us, only the ones involving Solomon Island loggers and Solomon Island villagers were more protected. So we can't say for sure that they were the main perpetrators, but they were most of the stories that we collected for this report.
HILTON: Your report's calling on urgent action from the Solomon Islands government, what would you like them to do?
HERBERT: What we would like to see is as you just said some urgent and strong action from the government on this. We suggested that there's a new ministry which has just started here, the Ministry of Women, Children and Youth, and we're hoping that they will be willing to oversee the recommendations of the report. So we're wanting the government to take onboard the findings of this report and the recommendations of this report and actually follow them through themselves, rather than coming from outside international agencies.
HILTON: What would you like to see the logging companies do to stop this abuse?
HERBERT: We would like to see the logging companies actually take responsibility for the actions of their employees. At the moment it's possible to charge or prosecute against an individual, not that there's been any cases of that actually happening in the Solomon Islands, but it is possible. But we'd actually like to see the responsibility also on the logging company. So if there is evidence that a logger working in the camp has abused a child, then our feeling is that the logging company should actually be banned from logging in the Solomon Islands.
HILTON: Is there any trauma counselling available for victims of the abuse currently?
HERBERT: Not at the moment, that's a pretty common thing across the Solomon Islands. There's a real lack of counselors and that's particularly an important issue here. I mean we've had the tsunami this year, which has caused trauma to a number of people, we've got these ongoing issues and there are also the tensions across the 1999 to 2003 where a lot of people lost family members or were involved in fighting and had experienced trauma. So it's a real lack across the whole country.
