Last year Gary Devine, a mother and her twelve year old daughter ‘Angela’ sat down and formulated a plan to pimp Angela out to fund the trio’s drug habits.
All went well and the trade was a roaring success with what was originally reported as being 100 male customers now ballooning out to over 200 men. With the money rolling in and the relatively small customer base to be found in Tasmania (or whoppingly large proportionally) of men wanting to sleep with a twelve year old, eventually someone squealed and the police shut the operation down.
For their part in the horrendous act of prostituting out a twelve year old, Gary Devine and Angela’s mother were both sentenced to 10 years jail.
Job well done, case closed.
Well, almost. What about the two hundred Tasmanian men who slept with Angela? Surely they can’t be that hard to track down?
Apparently so. Due to a combination of not wanting to put now thirteen year old Angela on the stand to recite her sexual experiences and the fact that ‘I thought she was 18′ is somehow a valid defense against child prostitution in Australia, the 200 closet Tasmanian pedophiles get to walk free.
My thoughts were that we need to take a long hard look at the law if ‘I thought she was 18′ is a valid defense and as for Angela’s welfare… well despite being drug addicted and part of the group that came up with the plan to whore her out – fair enough she’s only twelve (now thirteen), if she doesn’t want to go through it all again then I don’t blame her.
Maybe with her parent and Devine removed she’s come to her senses and decided to move on with her life.
…that’d be a reasonable assumption to make, except for the part where Angela is now preparing a case against the state government (the taxpayer) for compensation.
Oh, and she wants you to fund her legal case too.
Angela was a ward of the state and despite living at home with her mother and primarily being under her care. Somehow that means that the government and by proxy, we the tax payer, were responsible for her welfare. More then that, we’re actually her legal guardians.
First and foremost what kind of stupid system is this? If you’re a ward of the state what the hell are you doing being drug addicted and living with your drug addicted mother? How the hell are we supposed to be held accountable if this is how wards of the state are allowed to live?!
Secondly, despite no doubt being under the influence of drugs Angela was privvy and a part of the decision making process to sell herself into prostitution. Now, I’m not going to suggest a twelve year old perhaps realises the full gravity of the situation in selling herself openly but if she’s mature enough to consider legal action against the government, there’s probably a good chance she understood what was going on.
Even more so that she probably wasn’t an innocent virgin either when all this came about. I’m not implying that non-virgins aren’t innocent but that Angela probably had a good grasp of sex and what it involved – let alone prostitution and the idea of sex for money.
How on Earth then is the government responsible for the welfare of this child?
I don’t really know what it takes to become a ward of the state but if you can do so and still live at home with your druggie mother and her boyfriend and be addicted to drugs yourself – something’s broken.
Then there’s the issue of Angela reliving her experiences. Obviously someone’s talked to her about it and when the issue came up the police were were ‘reluctant to put the girl through the ordeal of having to give evidence at multiple trials‘.
Yet to mount a case against the state government, Angela is going to have to ‘provide evidence she has suffered at the hands of their neglect‘. This is obviously going to cover what exactly happened to her under the care of her mother and will include the whole prostitution ordeal.
Unfortunately to launch such a case Angela is looking at around $10,000 to come up with the various reports and what not. Now instead of partnering up with lawyers who think her’s is a strong case and funding her themselves, she’s gone with some guy Roland Browne.
Browne yesterday placed an ad in a newspaper calling on public donations to help fund the case. Angela and Browne want the public to fund the case in order for them to then go ahead and sue the government, which inevitably will hit the taxpayer in the pocket.
Despite not willing to put the funds up himself (really, what’s ten grand to a lawyer?), Browne claims ‘we’re of the view that she has a good case against the Government‘.
Really? But not ten grand sure enough to start a case that you just know is going to kick off with Angela demanding millions…?
Something doesn’t add up here.
If this case goes ahead and Angela wins (and I have no doubt she will win given the circumstances) then this entire ward of the state system needs to be scrapped.
As a taxpayer I find it utterly ridiculous that the government can be the legal guardian of someone, yet they still live at home as a drug addict with their drug addicted parents.
If the government is the guardian and we’re going to start dishing out compensation claims for neglect then it’s clearly time to yank out all wards of the state and place them into suitable foster or state run care.
Families be damned, why should we the taxpayer be left to foot the bill of people’s utterly messed up lives? Clearly Angela’s mother was unfit to be a parent and ten minutes with a psychologist should have established that.
And as for Angela, be angry at Devine and your mum. They’re the ones that actually allowed all this to happen, and all of the public money in the world isn’t going to change that.