MAP Forum

An explosive British police investigation code named Operation Unique, brought an island rife with paedophilia to its knees. The deep dive into this murky underworld of abuse ran between 2004 and 2007, leading to the conviction of seven men, including the mayor, on dozens of counts of rape and indecent assault against girls as young as seven.

A thought-provoking podcast, The Pitcairn Trials, hosted by British journalist Luke Jones, lays bare how Britain’s most isolated colony became arguably its most shameful. The story begins, inevitably, with the Mutiny on the Bounty. On April 28, 1789, Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian and 18 crewmen seized HMS Bounty from Captain William Bligh, setting him adrift in a launch. After a 3,618-nautical-mile open-boat voyage immortalised by Bligh’s own log and later by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall’s 1932 novel, the mutineers reached Tubuai and eventually Tahiti.