When I read your earlier comment, where you referenced the 5th gen Australian father, I started considering the girl in that same light. It is atypical for a 12yo Australian girl to think that marriage at that age is okay or desirable. Therefore there must have been some unusual element in this girl's education and upbringing that made her believe marriage was a neat idea. I understand that her 'consent' is illegal and immaterial - just as the convicted man's argument that she was 'mature and developed for her age' is irrelevant and foul. I was simply imagining how she could have come to this belief. I doubt we’ll ever get much information about her, which is fair enough. I hope that she is getting a lot of counselling. It’s possible that the girl’s viewpoint was formed only by her home life, and outside the home she lived the life of an average Australian 12yo girl – but I find this difficult to accept, given the importance of peer and teacher relationships to that age group. Had she attended a standard multicultural school and had a spread of friends from the wider community and cultural background, those relationships should have mitigated this attitude taught at home. An enclave to normalise that sort of view doesn’t need to be people perpetually taking child-brides; I hope that most Australians agree that not only is it illegal but also undesirable. To support the development of these convictions in the girl, all an ‘enclave’ or ‘group’ needs is to be a community that encourages young marriage, teaches that girls are mature ‘women’ once they start menstruation, has husbands often significantly older than the wife, gets family communications from OS with (very) young’uns marrying – in the absence of explicit instruction that marrying children is wrong, these fairly benign (on their own) things could have normalised that sort of attitude. I wonder if she’d been home-schooled or something.
The part where the imams didn’t (to the best of my knowledge) report this request to the police or to DOCS should be prosecuted, imo. He showed a clear intent to have intercourse with a very young girl, meaning that she’s in danger. I read that the man told the imams that he had the consent of the girl’s father, which should have raised the red flag even higher.