Feature Stories: Child Sexual Abuse

A 9yr old boy is driven to the Police Child Protection Unit to see if he will give a statement. The boy had gone to visit his grandfather who worked on a farm and was brutally raped and beaten by a five friends he was playing with. The perpetrators were two 8yr olds, two 11yr olds and a 13yr old. They was brutally gang raped him, sodomised him with sticks and other objects and beat him with metal rods They then tied him to a tree and left him there overnight to die. The following morning they came back to see if he had died and he was still alive so they untied him and told him to go and wash himself in the nearby river. The boy was found by a police officer investigating another case near the farm. The case also involved the boys, who had brutally killed 12 springbok (gazelle) on a neighbouring farm. It is thought that the young boy was present and threatened to report them. The gang of boys were never convicted because the victim was too scared to talk. Cape Town, March 2004