Child abuse increase – call for tougher sentences

ions.
“Well your honour, this girl is not exactly my own direct child but is my granddaughter’s child…”
“Shut up!” magistrate Kuwanda interjects angrily. “That child is as good as your own child. What is the difference between her and your own daughter, ha?”
“Well, because she was born by my granddaughter,” the man argues, pleading with the magistrate to hand down a lighter sentence.
Confounded by the man’s actions, magistrate Kuwanda jails the man for 12 years.
At the Rotten Row Court, magistrate William Bhila shakes his head in disbelief.
“How can you be intimate with a two-year old child? What is wrong with you?”
“I was told by a witch doctor that it could cure AIDS,” replies the 36-year old man, to which magistrate Bhila, visibly angry, retorts: “I will have to send you to prison. You have also infected that poor thing with AIDS. I am sentencing you to 24 years in prison.”
These are just two of the 2,000 reported rape cases involving children as young as three months old brought before the courts last year in Zimbabwe, which the authorities and civic groups believe is a mere tip of the iceberg.
Child sexual abuse is on the increase in the country, a phenomenon the southern African nation is deeply divided over its cause and how to handle it.
In most of the cases, the children are raped by relatives in whose custody they would have been entrusted, making the abuse difficult to detect.
But most worrying to the authorities and women pressure groups is the emerging trend in which the crime is increasingly being committed by people advised by witch doctors to rape a minor to be cured of illnesses not responding to treatment.
The belief among the rapists and witch doctors is that the sexual purity of a young girl’s soul and body has medicinal value, and in some cases, the crime is committed in the belief it would bring luck.
The result has been devastating to both the victims and their parents. Many of the children raped are infected with sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS.
Studies show as much as 70 percent of child rape victims in Zimbabwe are infected with a sexually transmitted disease of one form or another. Estimates indicated that among 3,000 people who succumb weekly to AIDS in the country, 30 percent are children who would have suffered sexual abuse.
Delays in detecting child sexual abuse, because of the home environment in which most of the rape cases occur, make the victims particularly vulnerable to disease infections.
A pressure group, Child and Law Project, estimates that most of the rape cases only come to light after one year, if the victim does not suffer immediate physical harm or disease infection from the abuse.
Other studies indicate child sexual abuse cases are so widespread in the country that most girls in Zimbabwe were becoming sexually active at the age of eight, which is just half the country’s legal age of consent.
A commission of inquiry set up by President Robert Mugabe two years ago found most young girls lived under the constant threat of sexual abuse, and suggested stringent laws to protect the children.
“Such a development (growing child sexual abuse) is of great concern because of the risk of these children contracting STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections) and HIV,” said the commission in its report.
But the nation is still unsure, despite the various studies on child sexual abuse, of the exact causes of the increase in the number of rape cases involving minors which occur even in remote corners of the country.
While court evidence from child rape cases point to a growing involvement of witch doctors in the crimes, the traditional healers argue instead that the expanding influence of Western culture was the main culprit.
Handson Gwindi, research and education officer at the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers’ Association (ZINATHA), admits some members of his group advised their clients to sleep with young girls for medicinal purposes, but said the majority of rape cases involved people influenced by Western culture.
“There are people who are told to sleep with young children for various reasons such as to make money. This is done by people using bad medicine,” he said.
“The other reason for the increase is because of migration. The things we are seeing today are foreign – they are not African. Our culture does not allow us to sleep with our children or even to look at them with sexual thoughts. Westernisation has destroyed our culture,” he added.
But women pressure groups say the crime is becoming prevalent because of sentences passed by the courts on offenders were not stiff enough to deter people from child sexual abuse.
They are advocating death sentences for rape offenders, or better still castration, two possible punishment forms which they feel would be proportional to the gravity of the crime and also serve as a sufficient deterrent.
“We should not look at the sentences, but the purpose of passing the sentences. Castration should be considered in rape cases so that you remove the problem permanently,” said a researcher with the Girl Child Network.