"Smoke for Poke" Sex Ring Busted in Australia

(Kimberley Region, Western Australia) Due to the persistence of law enforcers, specifically two detectives, a major child sex crime ring was smashed in the far northwestern coastal region of Australia, west of Darwin. Astonishingly, entire indigenous communities were found to have been corrupted.

IT started on April 12, 2007, with one phone call from an Aboriginal woman in Kalumburu, in the north of Western Australia. The woman was talking of a sex-for-cigarettes trade between older community leaders and teenage girls. It was called "smoke for a poke".

Detective Sergeant Tom Doyle, of Kununurra Criminal Investigation Branch, did not fob the caller off. He and another detective, Grant Barber, flew out to see her the following day. Out of that initial meeting, the whole of the Kimberley region has been turned upside down.

A culture of rape and cheap sex with children has been broken, with 132 people charged with more than 600 offences.

Seventy per cent of the offenders were adults and 39 per cent of the victims were children under 13. Most of the remainder were teenagers who may now be adults.

Kimberley Region (showing Western Australia/Northern Territory)
During the initial investigation, Detective Doyle learned there was a house in Kalumburu where girls would knock on the door and ask for cigarettes. Men would respond by saying, "I'll give you a smoke if you suck me off."

"From there, there would be pornographic movies, sexual intercourse, oral sex and indecent dealings," he [Doyle] says. "Some of it was in the presence of other girls, and the men would take turns having sex with them.

Ultimately, sex assault and child sex investigation teams arrived to augment the regional police and 18 separate code-named law enforcement operations were conducted throughout the Kimberley region. Anecdotal reports of heinous sex crimes abound.

Prosecutions in the Kununurra Courthouse are ongoing with 35 people being found guilty of sex crimes thus far and it's believed that the aboriginal culture in the Kimberley region has been influenced for the better due to the work of Detectives Doyle and Barber. Despite cost-savings efforts to shut down the task force on indigenous child sex abuse, drug trafficking and alcohol-related crime, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd extended funding for task force operations for another year.

Companion post at The Jawa Report.