Monday, October 13, 2008
Pa ‘rapes, threatens to kill’ daughter
AN eight-year-old girl accused her father of raping her then threatening to take her life if she would report the incident.
Nevertheless, Kathy’s (real name withheld) fear led her to report the violation to her mother, and she confessed that her father had been molesting her ever since she was six years old.
Kathy’s mother filed a complaint of rape against the father, which was elevated to a criminal charge last Wednesday.
But her father, a farmer, claimed his wife only fabricated the complaint because she could not stand their poverty and his meager income.
The couple, who lives in Cogon, Naga, Cebu, has six children.
When Kathy reported the incident to her mother last June 10, two of her older sisters confessed that their father used to molest them, too.
This reportedly led them to immediately leave the house once they were old enough to work. They said they were “too ashamed” to bring the incident out in the open because it was their father who violated them.
Kathy alleged that the last time her father raped her was on June 8 at around 1 p.m. After he molested her, he allegedly told her to keep mum or he would kill her if she told her mother.
Angry
Kathy said in a sworn statement that this made her angry.
Her mother narrated in an affidavit how, two days later, Kathy would not leave her side, saying she would go anywhere her mother went.
In a two-page resolution, Naga Prosecutor Aida Sanchez rejected the suspect’s denial of the crime.
“When a woman, more so if she is a minor, says she has been raped, she says in effect all that is necessary to prove that rape was committed,” Sanchez quoted a Supreme Court (SC) ruling in the case of People vs. Ancheta.
Kathy’s father also alleged that there were defects in her medical certificate. But Sanchez quoted another SC ruling that in rape cases, medical certificates are “merely corroborative” and “not indispensable.”
As to his wife’s alleged malice in accusing him of raping their daughter because she found him too poor a farmer, Sanchez ruled that the excuse was “ludicrous, if not hilarious.”
After the case was elevated to court last Wednesday, Kathy’s father now faces a non-bailable charge. (KAB)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (October 13, 2008 issue)
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