A modern form of “grave robbery” is flourishing online, experts say, as bone collectors take advantage of legal loopholes to buy and sell human remains.
In Australia, where it is illegal to buy or sell human remains (although with some exceptions), people sell photographs of the remains and then add the bones as a “gift.”
While people may trade remains to make money, some experts say others with the macabre habit of collecting them do so for power, management and identity.
Dr Damien Huffer, author of These Were People Once: The Online Trade in Human Remains and Why It Matters, realizes that some people have collections that can rival those in museums, and Australia's laws are not enough to stop them. .
“The laws are quite inconsistent at state and territory level, and certainly between countries,” he says.
“And now there are so many things online – [it] It might have been a very specific little subculture of the antiques trade if the Web had never existed, but because of the way the world works, what was once a niche has exploded.”
Huffer, an honorary researcher at the University of Queensland and co-founder of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online, has studied a specific tactic in Australia, where photographs of human remains with the bones included are offered for sale as a “gift” to avoid prosecution. laws on buying and selling.
Bone traders also use emojis, code words and hashtags to connect with each other and evade detection.
They could talk about “oddities” that are “human,” for example. In an article published in the Journal of Laptop Purposes in Archeology, Huffer describes one person who posted: “Would anyone give away (wink emoji)… one or two male or female femurs?”
Another says: “Weirdos! I have something… special available. You will receive the photo plus a free old medical sample… current (bone emoji). (Boat emoji) inc. payment plans available.
And it's not just about skeletal remains. Creams (bone fragments left after a body is cremated) and wet samples, such as organ slices, are also marketed.
It has been illegal to sell human remains since 1982, when human tissue legislation was implemented in all states and territories. But many doctors were given real skeletons during their training, so bone collections endured, sometimes turning up in sheds and the properties of the deceased.
“Medical” specimens have a kind of legitimacy because many were imported before legal changes made the importation of human remains illegal and because of limited exemptions for medical items.
Huffer says bones in Australia often arrived decades ago from India, Bangladesh and other places. He realizes that they were “the unclaimed, the lower caste, the poor, who were taken, stripped, disinfected [and] cabling”.
South Australian police are investigating the alleged sale of human skulls by auctioneers Small and Whitfield: one “medical skull” sold for $600, another “with an open skull and some vertebrae” and a “missing jaw” lower” sold for $1,500.
A police spokesman said the auction house was co-operating and “no crime has been identified to date”.
“Determining the origin of all the remains can be a complex and lengthy process,” the spokesperson says.
Small and Whitfield general manager David Kabbani says they have received about three or four skulls in the last 20 years that were not medical samples. “As auctioneers, we know the difference between a genuine medical piece, a skull used for medical purposes, and something that comes from no one, nowhere, that we hand over. [to police]”, he says.
When asked about the origin of the medical parts, Kabbani says they come from retired doctors, who were legally provided with them as part of their training when it was legal to import them. Cube said there was a lot of uncertainty about the law as it stands, even among the police.
“On many occasions when we have had questions about the sale of these things, we have called the police to get an answer and they are not sure,” he says.
Dr Maeghan Toews, a professor at Adelaide Law School who teaches medical law and ethics, says state and territory legislation prohibits the buying and selling of human tissue, from living and deceased bodies.
“However, there are exceptions, and that is where some of the uncertainty arises,” he says.
Toews points to South Africa's Anatomy and Transplantation Act 1983, which allows the sale or supply of tissue “if the tissue has undergone processing or treatment and the sale or supply is for use, in accordance with the instructions of a medical, for therapeutic, medical or scientific purposes.”
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“One point of confusion,” he says, “is what is considered a 'scientific purpose,' which is not defined in the law.
“Another point of confusion… is the degree of 'processing' required to transform fabric into salable goods.
“Finally, while the requirement that tissue sold be used 'in accordance with a physician's instructions' makes sense for therapeutic and medical uses, it is also unclear whether this applies (or should apply) for 'scientific purposes.' “
Australia's Authorized Reform Commission launched an inquiry into state and territory laws in August.
The research may clarify some of these points of confusion, he says.
Macabre collector subculture
There is a long history of collecting human parts, as war trophies and in museums, in the name of science (often racial science).
There is a long history of colonizers stealing human remains. In Australia, missions to repatriate First Nations ancestral remains are underway.
Today's collectors might explain their macabre habits as an appreciation of human biology, or curiosity, or gothic aesthetics, says Samantha Waite, but she thinks there could be a different way. reason.
Waite, a former palliative care psychotherapist, now runs Taboo Schooling, which works to demystify death.
She says there are several reasons why people enter the bone trade and it is often related to the desire to prove their identity and be accepted by a specific subculture of collectors.
“Many of them tend not to interact much with the living; “This is their way of telling themselves that they are still interacting with humans,” he says.
“And there can be a sense of power.
“From a psychological point of view, specific parts of the body tend to mean certain things and a skull definitely has power.”
Huffer says people should think about how they would feel if their loved ones were “taken from their resting place, dug up, circulated and recirculated with price tags.”
It is dehumanizing and perpetuates colonial violence, he says.
“The bottom line is that no one who entered the medical bone trade… none of them gave their consent to be used as such,” he says.
“Who knows, [there might be] “There are hundreds of thousands of examples on the market, from the days before consent forms and paperwork – it’s just another form of grave robbery.”