Child rape judgement in March
2010-01-13 22:20
Pretoria - A Pretoria North mother and her ex-boyfriend accused of the rape and indecent assault of the woman's six-year-old daughter will hear their fate in March.
Judge Joseph Raulinga on Wednesday reserved judgment until March 10 in their criminal trial in the High Court in Pretoria (North Gauteng High Court).
Both are presently out on bail.
The woman, 38, and the 26-year-old man have denied guilt to a charge of rape, six charges of indecent assault and three charges of assault.
The couple have a four-year-old son together.
The state alleges that in 2005 the mother helped her boyfriend rape, sodomise and indecently assault her young daughter. The little girl was alleged sexually abused with sticks, branches, dagga and a vibrator.
Her mother allegedly gagged her when she started to scream during the abuse. The child was also allegedly forced to drink sleeping pills.
Medical evidence described a series of severe injuries and supported the young girl's evidence that she was repeatedly raped and sodomised.
The mother did not deny that her daughter - who now lives with her grandmother - had been sexually abused, but claimed she did not know about the abuse as she was under the influence of alcohol and sleeping pills.
Her former boyfriend insisted he barely had any contact with the little girl during his brief sexual relationship with the child's mother and "never did anything wrong".
He told the court he only had sex with the woman because she showered him with gifts and paid for his drugs.
State Advocate Phyllis Vorster urged the court to reject the woman's defence of automatism. She said the sexual abuse had not taken place once, but repeatedly.
When the girl showed her injuries to her mother, she replied "that was what men did", and did nothing further to help her child. It was not a "reflex movement" to force a vibrator into a child's vagina and anus, Vorster said.
Even though the girl had been very young and was a single witness, the she had been very clear and precise about what had happened to her.
She had also from the very start identified her mother and the boyfriend as the perpetrators and never wavered in her evidence against them, the prosecutor added.
The defence argued it was "reasonably possibly true" the mother acted involuntary, as the girl told the court her mother had acted like someone who was asleep.
- SAPA