A Good Belting

I was prepared (or I thought I was prepared) for violence. In 2005 and 2006, Human Rights Watch produced two reports on police brutality in Papua New Guinea, with special attention to the interactions of police and vulnerable persons, including sex workers, men who have sex with men, the informal sector, boy and girl children and women. I read them – one before I left, the follow up in spare hours throughout my first weeks here. I have put the links at the side. Read them, if you have the time. And imagine what it is that I imagine throughout my polite and cheerful dealings with police.

What it is to be white in Papua New Guinea, is, among other things, to be treated with deference way beyond your experience, and often over and above your older, wiser, senior colleagues. There is a sort of universal agreement that everything you say is terribly sensible and redolent of expertise, at least for as long as you are in the room. It’s not polite-ness (the obsequiousness of bad waiters and men who say laay-dies) – but a truer courtesy, the precious handling of a novelty, and, occasionally, distrust.

So it is that senior police acknowledge me with a wave from the high front cab of the vehicle

(and I picture young women, pulled from the parked van by their hair, two by two into the thick jungle)

In the station, where desks are arranged so that only the interviewer is seated, a junior officer is dispatched to fetch me a chair

(and I picture a row of teenaged boys, standing, with their genitals on the desk, percussive thwack of a stick brought down across them)

I am not a witness to such things. I struggle with myself in almost every encounter – disgust at them – disgust at my own prejudice – and the thought, unavoidable: this is why no-one reports crime.

There is another reason.

I am afraid to admit it, but in some way I understand the violence: the bully’s instinct, swelled in a uniform – some other, bigger anger, a collective impotence that can be exorcised on the snappable body of a young man. A good belting to release frustration, that will set him right.

The things I have witnessed are not really things I am able to write about. The vaguest outline involves not brutality, but mostly a lot of things that just don’t happen – a lot of people who aren’t where they should be – and a certain smell in the narrow gaps between bodies in a cell, which I will leave you to imagine for yourselves.

I say I understand the violence because right now all I want to do is grab this incompetent police prosecutor (with his yes and his of course and his lazy-heartless-do-nothing) – I want to take him by the shoulders and I want to shake him, slap his fat face side to side to side until his teeth are loose – and this feeling, I suppose, is just exactly how these things start.